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One Giant Cell at the Museum

Grade 6 cell model practice: a museum's cutting tests on a one-celled alga and cell counts show how the nucleus, membrane and other parts work together.

Grade 6ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-LS1-2

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
11 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 6
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Sorting, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students use cutting-test results to explain the role of the nucleus in a cell.
Students relate the number of mitochondria or chloroplasts in a cell to the job the cell does.
Students argue from evidence that cell parts depend on each other.

How to use

Read the passage together and walk through one row of the results table before students work alone; have them name the piece they compare in each answer.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-LS1-2

Model how the parts of a cell, such as the nucleus, cell membrane, chloroplasts and mitochondria, work together.

Preview

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Name Date

One Giant Cell at the Museum

Use cutting tests and cell counts to model how cell parts depend on each other.

The wineglass alga tests

Read the passage and the results table, then answer the questions.

A Seaweed Made of One Cell

1On a class trip to the Harborview Museum of Natural History, Marisol Quintana's sixth-grade group walked past the fossil hall to a new exhibit called Inside the Cell. Its centerpiece is a saltwater tank of mermaid's wineglass, a green seaweed from warm, shallow seas. Each one looks like a tiny umbrella about 5 cm tall, with a root-like base, a thin green stalk and a round cap. The surprise is that each whole umbrella is one single cell. Its only nucleus sits in the base.

2A panel describes a classic set of experiments that scientists first did with this alga about ninety years ago. The museum's biologist, Dr. Saoirse Nyberg, repeats them in the lab behind the tank. She cuts living cells into pieces with a fine blade and keeps each piece in its own dish of seawater under the same lights. The panel reminds visitors that the nucleus holds the cell's genetic information.

3In Test 1, she cuts the cap off a cell, leaving the base and stalk together. In Test 2, she cuts another cell into three pieces: the cap, a middle piece of stalk, and the base. In both tests, each time a piece grows a new cap, she cuts that cap off too, to see whether the piece can grow another one.

4Test 3 uses two species. The smooth-cap species grows a cap shaped like a solid disk. The fringed-cap species grows a cap split into separate, finger-like rays. Dr. Nyberg cuts the base off a smooth-cap cell and joins it to a stalk from a fringed-cap cell. The two pieces heal into one cell. When a cap grows, she records its shape, cuts it off and waits for the next one.

5Marisol copied the panel's results table, shown below, and also wrote down two more tables from the exhibit's microscope station for the second part of this sheet.

Results After 8 Weeks
Test	Piece	Has the nucleus?	New caps grown	Alive at 8 weeks?
1	Base and stalk	Yes	A new cap after every cut	Yes
2	Cap alone	No	None	No (died in about 2 weeks)
2	Middle stalk piece	No	One, then none	No
2	Base alone	Yes	New stalk and cap after every cut	Yes
3	Smooth-cap base + fringed stalk	Yes (smooth-cap)	1st mixed shape; later smooth disks	Yes

Which two pieces from Test 2, compared with each other, give the clearest evidence that the nucleus is needed for the cell to keep living and rebuilding its parts?