Question Video: Identifying Differences between Plant and Animal Cells

Video Transcript

Look at these pictures of plant and animal cells. Which part can you see that can only be found in a plant cell?

To answer the question, we need to identify a part that is found in the plant cell but not the animal cell. Let’s start by labeling some of the parts we recognize. We can see a nucleus present in each of the animal and plant cells. The nucleus controls biological processes in the cell, such as cell division. We can see that each animal and plant cell is filled with a jellylike substance called cytoplasm. Cytoplasm is where most of the cell processes controlled by the nucleus take place. We can see that surrounding each plant and animal cell is a plasma membrane. The plasma membrane controls what goes in and out of the cell and can be seen here as a thin black line around each cell.

There is one other part we can see surrounding each plant cell, the cell wall. The cell wall is a thick, rigid wall which gives these plant cells their distinctive rectangular shape. The animal cells do not have this thick, rigid cell wall, so their shapes can change and are not regular like the plant cells. We can see the cell wall here as a dark green thicker line surrounding each plant cell. Here, we can see the cell walls highlighted in pink. We can see that there are no cell walls surrounding the animal cells, which is why they do not have the distinctive shape of the plant cells.

So the answer is the cell wall. The part we can see that can only be found in a plant cell is the cell wall.