the.com/cytoplasm
the crowded jelly where your cell does all the living, jammed wall to wall with machinery.
means The thick, gel-like fluid that fills a cell between its membrane and nucleus, holding all the organelles and most of the action of metabolism.
from Built from Greek parts by 19th-century biologists naming the newly-glimpsed insides of cells: kytos, 'a hollow vessel' (later borrowed for 'cell'), plus plasma, 'something molded or formed,' from plassein, 'to shape.' So literally 'the stuff shaped within the cell-vessel' — a cousin of the 'plasm' in protoplasm and the 'plast' in chloroplast.
- packing
- So crowded molecules barely diffuse without bumping neighbors
- not liquid
- Behaves like gel, flowing only when prodded
- streaming
- Plant cytoplasm physically circulates inside the cell
- composition
- Roughly 80 percent water, yet structured like architecture
- name origin
- Greek for cell and molded substance