The human body is home to a variety of cells - be it the neurons that dictate our thoughts or oxygen-carrying cells in the blood. Now, researchers from institutions in Germany, Canada, Spain, and the United States have published a study of how individual cells of each type are normally found in a human body.
They analysed 1,500 published sources to deduce that most adult males have 36 trillion cells, while adult females have 28 trillion cells. In comparison, a 10-year-old child would have 17 trillion cells.
Body's mathematical approach to cell regulation
Besides the cell count, the study found something of interest - that if cells are grouped into categories based on their size, then each size category accounts for roughly the same amount to the mass of the body, Science Alert reported.
"These patterns are suggestive of a whole-organism trade-off between cell size and count and imply the existence of cell-size homeostasis across cell types," researchers wrote in their paper. Essentially, the body balances cells by making sure that fewer larger cells and more smaller cells are produced to even out the quantity.
Our cells are sized to enable the function of different roles. If this scale is disrupted in any way, the presence of disease is inevitable. "Our data serves to establish a holistic quantitative framework for the cells of the human body, and highlight large-scale patterns in cell biology," the teams write in the study published in PNAS.
This highly mathematical pattern is important to regulate the function of each cell in the human body. In the future, scientists can probe how this regulation of cells takes place in the human body.
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