Onion Cells Under the Microscope

In order to observe the onion cells under the microscope, took small size onion and cut it into small pieces with kitchen knife. Inside onion, we can see the layers. Those layers are the fleshy leaves of the onion and these fleshy leaves are made made up of mostly water and inside you also have some sulfur compounds. These sulfur compounds they make you cry when you cut the onion. There's concave side of the onion leaf. You can remove an epithelial cell layer. That's very easy to remove, but this layer is three or four cells thick. This is not what we want to observe under the microscope because the cells will be layered one above the other. We want layer, we want film from the convex side, the shining side of the onion leaf. And we break it like this and remove the film from the shining side of the onion leaf and this is only one cell thick layer. And that's what we want to observe under the microscope. We put this layer on on the slide and the stain that we are going to use for this because these cells are almost colorless, we are going to use iodine and this iodine is going to color these cells properly and put cover slip on this and then we can take these cells under the microscope. When we observe these cells under the low power, we see these hexagonal cells and sheets of them. There is sheet of these cells under the low power. When we look at these cells at the high power, we can see these cells they have six sides, they are hexagonal and the most prominent feature of the cells are the cell walls. We can see thick cell wall only found in the plant cells, they are not in the animal cells and these cell walls are visible at the high power. Inside the cells at the high power, we can see the cytoplasm. If we change the focus of the microscope, we can see big vacuole, big empty space inside the cells. Sometimes these vacuoles they take most of the space inside the cell. The nucleus is usually attached on one side of the wall, on the inside of the cell. They're fairly large size nuclei. And inside the nucleus you can see nucleoli. They are fairly good size and darker in color and they make the ribosomes. And in this nucleus there are many nucleoli.