what is the functional advantage to small cell size?

Question

1.It is the ratio of cell surface to cell volume that imposes upper limits on cell size.
In your discussion, describe the effect of cell size on surface area and cite an example of functional advantage to a small cell size.

Answer 1

it is important for cells to have a high surface area to low volume ratio for one reason... things have more space along the surface to get in..or out.. but dont have to travel very far into the cell to get to the middle. thats it plain and simple

Answer 2

Since cells get stuff in and out via concentration dependant processes, small size is an advantage, since the rate of difussion of a solute is an absolute amount. If cells were huge then nutrient transport could be slowed down too much. However, that being said, some cells are very large ;for example Xenopus eggs are 1mm in size, they are a single cell. Same thing for chicken eggs, really. But specialization requires lots of cells working in concert, and the establishment of morphogen gradients; thus you couldn't have a functional 'higher' life such as mammals without many many many cells, since there are so many different processes occuring which make up the whole organism.

Answer 3

My correspondent on Yahoo messenger are both getting the "Pink Bar" with the message "There was a problem handling your request, please retry the operation." Copy and paste into the typing area, and re-send, takes care of it. This happens several times a session ... We also have the less frequent but more disturbing problem of messages not getting through, where we have to guess from the context and the chat wait time that information was dropped. We again use copy and paste, this time to view jointly the last several transmissions and what text shows for the sender but not for the recipient. We assume this is a Yahoo glitch since it happens equally at each end of the conversation. 2/8/2015