UCSB Science Line (2024)

As you’ve probably guessed, the colors in adrawing of a cell are just to tell different partsof the cell apart. In general, human cells aretransparent, which means light passes rightthrough them. Some exceptions are red blood cellswhich are red because of iron content andpigmented cells like in a freckle. A big part ofscience is seeing things that you can’t seenormally with your eyes. The most well-known wayto do this is using a microscope which makesreally tiny things look huge. To see cells, acommon technique is to use a dye that will staincertain parts of a cell so that you can see them.But in reality, most cells don’t have any realcolor.

Another part to this question is what color is tobegin with. Humans perceive color when certaintypes of light hit an object and are reflectedinto their eyes. A rainbow for instance shows allof the different colors we can see. However, forsome animals with good night vision such as owls,their idea of color is different. Their eyes canprocess light that our eyes aren’t adjusted for.So in a sense, no object really has a color.Humans perceive an object to be a certain colorwhich is a property of the human as well as theobject.

It varies from cell to cell. For plants, we seethat they are green. Really, the cells themselvesare clear but the chlorophyll inside thechloroplast is green, so we really just see thecolor of the chloroplast. Similarly for blood, ared blood cell is clear, but has red hemoglobininside it that makes certain parts look red. Weonly see at high levels so it looks red to us.Most cells are like this.

Most cells are basically clear. Cells withpigments (like those in your skin and hair) havecolor due to the pigments (melanin in this case,which is brown). Chloroplasts in plant cells aregreen (they are the reason why plants are green).

Cells are typically colorless and basicallytransparent, although certain types of cells thatcontain pigments would exhibit the colors of theirpigments. For instance, many plant cells fromleaves have the pigment chlorophyll, which looksgreen. Many flowers, on the other hand, have avariety of pigments which are generally calledcarotenoids and can range in color from yellow toorange to red. Another example is human hair,which has varying amounts of a pigment calledmelanin and results in a variety of colors fromlight yellow to very dark brown.