 Hey everybody, Dr. O here. In this video I want to welcome you to the cell, right? So the cell is the basic unit of life. We're going to cover all the parts and pieces inside of the cell in this chapter. But I just want to talk about the cell in general right now. So the basic unit of life or the smallest unit that can perform all vital physiological functions, those would be some of the best definitions of what a cell is. What amazes me the most about the cell, besides the fact that every cell is responsible for maintaining its own homeostasis, keeping itself alive, plus doing some function for the greater good for the organism. What really amazes me about the cell is this is the leap from non-life to life, right? We always have these chicken or the egg debates and talk about these kind of things. But how does a cell take these non-living materials and put them together and have them spit out a living cell, a cell capable of all the things that come with being alive? That's pretty amazing. All cells are going to have a cell membrane. They're all going to have genetic material like DNA. They're all going to have the cytoplasm. There's lots of differences between cells, but those are some of the key similarities you're going to see. So this chapter is going to cover cytology or the study of the structure and function of cells. So this is going to be a cytology chapter. There are two major classes of cell types. We're going to spend most of our time talking about somatic cells. So soma means body. So your somatic cells are going to be your body cells, which is every cell in your body, except for your sex cells, which are often called germ cells. Those are going to be reproductive cells. So we'll introduce them here. We will talk about meiosis in this chapter and mitosis of body cells and meiosis of sex cells. But we're going to cover the sex cells in our last chapter together, so we won't spend too much time on that. So we're going to focus primarily on the body cells here. And then of course, throughout the chapters, throughout the course, I'll talk about individual cells when we need to, like neuron or hepatocyte, liver cell, those kind of things. So those are some things that kind of just get me excited about the cell. I hope you're excited to learn about it too. Sitting there, you're just as far as you probably see lots of different numbers. But the best evidence we have right now supports the fact that the average human is made of 37.2 trillion cells. So you're sitting there with 37.2 trillion cells all working together to keep you alive. So you can learn this stuff. So how cool is that? I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.