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brokendrumsticks t1_j54d7bj wrote

Reply to comment by ThoughtfulPoster in What color are cancer cells? by jennlara

What colours are brain, heart, liver, etc cells normally?

I recently started wondering this because someone said “liver coloured” and I think they meant the purple that livers are usually coloured in text books. I realised books have standard colours for organs and now we think those are the colours but obviously they are just for clarity

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HermitAndHound t1_j54qzig wrote

Most organs consist of more than one cell type. Fatty tissue is white to yellow. Muscle cells are red meat, looks the same in all mammals. As the heart is a muscle too, it's mostly red, with a bit of fat around it, and some shimmering white to almost silver connective tissue. Fasciae in general are really pretty. The single fiber is white, but in smooth organized sheets they can shimmer like pearl in pale rainbow colors.

White blood cells are translucent, only the red blood cells are actually red, platelets are yellow. White blood cells climb around in almost all tissues, so even a red muscle has some of those, and yellow-ish nerve fibers and the red-grey-white of blood vessels, it's a mix.

When you put any cell under a microscope most of them are translucent and barely visible. There are a bunch of organelles inside, filled with whatever this cell's product/purpose is. That's where the color comes from. Like chloroplasts in plant cells, just those are green, the rest is translucent. Few cells are so colorful that it's noticeable when you look at just one. The sheer mass of them makes organs as colorful as they are.

To really tell things apart the cells are dyed. There are different dyes/stains that attach to different parts of a cell. They even come in fluorescent. Some are as simple as binding to anything acidic or basic, others cling to just one specific molecule. Without dye it's hard to impossible to tell what is what.

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BluePlankton t1_j54ptoz wrote

Pretty much every part of the body has a colour some where along a spectrum between a yellowish off white to a dark, almost blackish red. Textbook images of cells from different organs will have been stained with different dyes to make the cell organelles more clear. The most common stain will probably be the H&E stain which makes everything look pink and purple.

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