What is cellular differentiation?
Q: What is cellular differentiation?
A: Cellular differentiation is the process by which a less specialized cell becomes a more specialized cell type. It is part of developmental biology and occurs many times during the development of a multicellular organism.
Q: How does cellular differentiation affect a cell's characteristics?
A: Differentiation dramatically changes a cell's size, shape, metabolic activity, and responsiveness to signals. These changes are largely due to changes in gene expression rather than DNA sequence itself.
Q: What is cell potency?
A: Cell potency is the ability of a cell to differentiate into other types of cells. A pluripotent cell can differentiate into many different types while totipotent cells can differentiate into all types. In mammals, only zygotes and early embryonic cells are totipotent while in plants many differentiated cells can become totipotent with laboratory techniques.
Q: What role do stem cells play in cellular differentiation?
A: Stem cells are pluripotent cells that have the ability to differentiate into many different types of daughter cells during tissue repair or normal cell turnover in adults. They also play an important role in development as they divide multiple times to form complex systems of tissues and various kinds of organelles inside the cells.
Q: How does gene expression change during cellular differentiation?
A: Gene expression changes significantly during cellular differentiation as certain genes not needed for particular tissues will be switched off while others may be activated or expressed differently depending on the needs of the particular tissue or organelle being formed. This results in physical differences between different kinds of tissues despite having identical genomes.
Q: Is there any difference between animal stem cells and plant meristematic cells?
A: Yes, animal stem cells are pluripotent while plant meristematiccells can become totipotent with simple laboratory techniques that allow them to differentiate into all types of daughter cells when necessary.
