Which part of the living system did you change?
Labs / Biology
Build a Cell
An empty membrane is waiting. Drag organelles in from the tray and each one wires up a different part of the cell's machinery — power, protein-making, and clean-up. Watch the meters climb and keep the viability bar high, then flip between an animal and a plant cell to see what each one truly needs.
Build a Cell
An empty membrane is waiting. Drag organelles in from the tray and each one wires up a different part of the cell's machinery — power, protein-making, and clean-up. Watch the meters climb and keep the viability bar high, then flip between an animal and a plant cell to see what each one truly needs.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
Living systems are connected and constantly changing. This model makes one biological process visible so you can test how its parts affect one another.
Explore
Try the model
ATP —/sProtein —/sViability ——
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- Remove every mitochondrion by dragging it out. Where does the ATP meter go, and can ribosomes still make protein without energy?
- What happens to viability if you add ribosomes but leave out the nucleus?
- Switch to a plant cell and drag in chloroplasts — now slide the sunlight down to zero. Who is still making energy in the dark?
- Try putting a chloroplast inside an animal cell. Why does the cell warn you instead of thanking you?
- Which single organelle raises the viability bar the most when a cell is nearly empty, and why might that be?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Explain the process as a chain: a change happens, the system responds, and that response affects what happens next. Use an observation from the model as evidence.
Check
Before you leave
How did the system respond?
How would you explain that response?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.