The Cell is Like a Bakery…
The cell is much like a bakery, it makes and ships things! Our bakery is a shop inside a building (cell membrane). The building itself separates and protects the bakery from its environment; it also has doors and windows to allow certain things to go in and out.
Let’s now take a tour inside the bakery. The bakery has several rooms. One room is the library (nucleus). In the library, you will find the recipes (DNA) for all the different baked goods made (proteins); no one is allowed to take the recipes out of the library!
The kitchen is where the bakers (ribosomes) make the baked goods. Since the recipes must stay in the library, the baker must get a transcript (RNA) of the recipe. The baker follows the transcribed recipes and makes the delicious treats! Some treats don’t make the cut! They are burnt or did not cook properly. Those treats go into the garbage disposal (peroxisome).
The baked goods have one of two destinations. Some baked goods stay in the shop; customers can walk in and purchase them. Other baked goods are shipped to outside places. These treats are sent to the packaging room (rough endoplasmic reticulum) where they are boxed. The boxed treats then go to the shipping room (Golgi Apparatus). In the shipping room, the boxes are given shipping labels that identify their destination. The labeled boxes are then put on a cart (vesicle) and taken outside of the bakery to get shipped.
There are some behind the scenes rooms to this bakery. The first is the electrical room (mitochondria). This room is very important! It makes sure that the building has the energy needed to run all the equipment (lights, ovens, heat, mixers, etc.). There is also an human resources (HR) room (nucleolus). HR is in charge of hiring new bakers (ribosomes).
Draw a picture to describe the bakery and its listed components. Label the name and cell part. (E.g. baker/ribosome)
Directions: From the analogy, write the general function for the organelles listed.
Mitochondria ________________________________________________________________
Ribosomes ________________________________________________________________
Nucleus ________________________________________________________________
Endoplasmic Reticulum _________________________________________________________
Golgi complex ________________________________________________________________
Protein ________________________________________________________________
Cell Membrane_______________________________________________________________
Lysosomes ________________________________________________________________
Nucleolus ________________________________________________________________
