Question: what are bone cells and what kind of experiments would you be doing on them

Ivor Geoghegan answered on 5 Mar 2018:

Your bodies is made of very small building blocks, like Lego. We call these building blocks “cells”. Your body has over 200 different types of cells: each of them with a different job. Your bones have 3 main cell types in them. One type that builds up your bone, one type that breaks bone down, and one that controls the other two other cell types to make sure everything is done right. These cell types all talk to each other to make sure your bones are healthy.
Your bone cells can feel when you walk around. We don’t entirely know how they do this, but we do know that in bone diseases like osteoporosis bone cells have trouble feeling when you walk around. I am doing experiments to find out more about how just one of the bone cell types feel when you are walking around and how this goes wrong in osteoporosis. To trick the cells into thinking that it’s in the body of someone walking around, I grow them in a special container that keeps the cells at body temperature with plenty of food. Then I pump liquid over the cells. This makes the cells think that the it in a body that’s moving around. I then study to see what the cells do in response to this.