CORVINUS UNIVERSITY of BUDAPEST FACULTY of HORTICULTURAL SCIENCE MODERN HORTICULTURE BOTANY Authors: Zsolt Erős-Honti (Chapter
CORVINUS UNIVERSITY OF BUDAPEST FACULTY OF HORTICULTURAL SCIENCE MODERN HORTICULTURE BOTANY Authors: Zsolt Erős-Honti (Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4) Mária Höhn (Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) Chapter I.: Plant cell (Citology) 1.1. The concept of the cell: elaboration and changes of the cell theory Today, generally accepted is the fact that all living creatures consist of cells. However, till the middle of the 17th century, researchers were not aware that all organisms would be composed of such units. In the 1650‘s, Jan Swammerdam, Dutch naturalist observed oval bodies in the blood and later he also discovered that the frog embryo consisted of small orbicles. For the very first time, plant cells were found by an English polyhistor, Robert Hooke in 1663 when examining the cork of woody plants. In his work Micrographia he named the observed structures (resembling the cells of the honeycomb) ‗cellula‘ (―cubicle‖, ―compartment‖), thus the denomination of cells themselves also dates back to him. (Although he had thought that the described ‗cellulae‘ were small water conducting tubes of the plant, and later it turned out that he only had observed the mere cell walls of dead cells in his microscope, his naming has remained ever since.) After the first observations, 175 more years passed until the cell concept was generalized to all the known living beings. In 1838, Mathias Jakob Schleiden, a German botanist discussed his observations with Theodor Schwann, a German physiologist in 1838 after that Schleiden determined cellular organization in plants, while Schwann did the same for animals. They published their common observations one year later (1839) in Schwann‘s book, where they also gave the points of the classic cell theory: 1.
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