I guess I’m just co fused how a single cell can grow so large and what that means for us when we, for instance, cut a yolk in half. Does it become two cells then?
In: Biology
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If it messes with your mind, the largest single cell organism is roughly the size of a [mandarin orange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa)
But to answer your questions as they appear –
Yes, an egg yolk is a single gigantic cell.
The ‘skin’ on the outside of an egg yolk is the skin that all cells have, just bigger.
If you cut a yolk in half you’ll burst the skin and it’ll pop so you can’t get 2 cells out of it that way. That would be like cutting a water balloon in half and getting two smaller water balloons.
Just because it’s a big cell, doesn’t mean it’s like a single ‘normal’ cell, all big like. The ‘normal’ cell part is still super small, it’s just surrounding by tons and tons of the nutritious goop we call ‘yolk’. It would be like having a marble in a bucket or a marble in a swimming pool. You still have a wet marble (a cell) but the stuff around it just got bigger.
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Worth reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1s5doo/is_egg_yolk_a_single_cell/
Yes, a egg is a single cell. When you cut it, you’ve killed it and it’s now two halves of what used to be a cell, not two cells. It can become two cells if allowed to grow and divide by itself.
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