and welcome to my channel, Sick Notes

where I explained medical things in simple terms like

the other week I looked at the medical anime Cells at Work

and not only did the show blow me away

but your response to the video did as well

over a million views in a few days

guys thank you so, so much for all the support

So it's only fair that I check out episode number two

of Cells at Work

[anime plays - Japanese audio]

So, we're following our red blood cell again

as she carries the oxygen around the body

and she's lost, like she spent most of the first episode

and we met them briefly before

but we get properly introduced to the very cute platelets

The medical term for them is the thrombocytes

"THROMBO" because they're involved in creating a thrombus-

That's what we call a blood clot

- and CYTE is a name we give to any mature cell

[Japanese audio continues]

So in this depiction they're little kids

and this ties in because platelets are actually very tiny

about a third of the size of a red blood cells

That's because their job is to really plug the small gaps

when a thrombus forms.

And this episode is called a scrape wound

so we're probably going to find out all about how they work and everything they're carrying as well

Aw, I like that the platelet calls the red blood cell "Big Sister"

because this is entirely accurate

because the two are related in the kind of family tree

of blood cells

So they share the same ancestry of cells all produced

in the center of the bones, what we call the bone marrow

in a process we call hematopoiesis

Quite literally means "production of blood"

So we have our stems cells in

the bone marrow

You've probably heard of these in lots of medical research because they've got the

ability to turn into lots of different cell types.

One of these cell types is the myeloid progenitor cells

quite a long word!

And in turn, they can develop into lots of different cells as well

So we have the erythrocyte

the red blood cell,

so one our of fan favorites in Cells at Work.

ERYTHRO means red and CYTE, as we said earlier,

is a mature cell.

The myeloid progenitor cell can also turn into a megakaryocyte

which sounds like something out power rangers, doesn't it?

I'll draw our megakaryocyte here

And this is the cell that produces platelets

Strictly speaking, platelets themselves

are not cells, they're just fragments

broken up from these big megakaryocyte

So when the red blood cell and the platelets refer to themselves

as sisters, you know, they pretty much are

And also just to complete the picture, this myeloid progenitor cell

can also turn into our favorite ...

The neutrophil

So they're kinda all

one big happy family

So this is our scrape wound, uh

it's much more radical than I expected

I mean the whole city, representing the skin,

has been damaged, but this kinda fits right? Anyone that's

had a scrape wound or an abrasion before will know that

it takes a long time to heal actually

you'll notice some discoloration for awhile, sometimes

you'll be permanently left with some kind of scar, so

maybe I underestimated - obviously these guys are very small

so even small injuries are gonna have big effects

on individual cells

There he is, the man! I'm not sure white blood cells quite

do this with red blood cells, but you know

creative license

Okay so in the first episode we had to deal with

one bacterium, the streptococcus pneumoniae

and in this one we have to deal with

a whole bunch, 'cause one of the functions

of the skin is to be a physical barrier between the outside

world and your bodies, so if that gets broken, then any

bacteria that's just normally

happily living on our skin, that doesn't effect us, can then get under

the skin and begin to proliferate

and cause an infection

like we see all these nasties here

And the classic example of a bacterium that normally lives on our skin

and doesn't cause any problems is staphlyococcus aureus

and its really well represented here

so the staphlyococcus, remember I talked about in the last video

means it forms these grape like colonies

We can see that the shape they've made the bacterium

kind of represents that

And aureus means gold or yellow-y color

that's obviously why they've picked this color

because staphlyococcus aureus has this kind of pigment

A gold yellow-y pigment that's part of its

defense mechanism that makes it

harder for the immune system to break down the bacteria

I love that.

Its a great sort of visual depiction

and explanation of vasoconstriction

so when our arteries become more narrow

during acute blood loss to stop blood from getting lost

Some of the really scary massive bleeds

I've seen as an emergency doctor, you get an idea

of the scale that the body can shut down peripherally when it needs to

So the patient would go look very pale and very cold

and although that's what you want your body to do

because you want to preserve all the blood

for the important organs

for a doctor that makes your job more difficult

in treating the patient because, you know, we want

to get access into the veins to try and give blood and fluids

and that's more difficult when the veins are kind of shutting down

So streptococcus pyogenes

So pyogenes means puss

presumably because this bacteria causes

lots of puss when it infects, and

pseudomonas!

I always wondered what these two bacteria looked like close up

When we meet streptococcus pyogenes here

its tail is made up of all these

little blobs connected together, I think that represents

the streptococcus colony

formation of this chain

that we talked about in the last episode

It does make you think, because you have these colonies

of bacteria on your skin, that when you do get a trauma

and they get in to the body, this

exact thing is happening, you know

not quite as bad ass and

dramatic, but your immune system is doing its job

it is fighting these bugs

Its a pretty amazing thing to happen

just so that all your other cells can carry on living

And so that they can carry on making you, you!

I'm not quite sure what all these other nasties are, the other

bacterium, but maybe we'll find out in later episodes

I'm judging at how much care and attention has gone into this show

No doubt they are based on some kind

of pathogen - maybe we'll find out in later episodes

I don't know of any of them that produce these kinds of

stick like projections, but let me know

in the comments if you do

So the ability to communicate between cells

totally happens, and you might think

how does that happen? Because these neutrophils as we learnt in the first

episode are migrating cells, so they can't really use things like

the nervous system to communicate to each other

well they use chemical messengers

that we call cytokines. so CYTO

meaning cells, as we talked about earlier, and KINES meaning

kinetic, because these cytokines are when a cell

produces them, draw other cells to that area

so that would be what would be going on here

So the staphylococcus aureus

has clearly done her microbiology class, discussing

all the immune cells and their kind of rough timelines

in fighting infection

Aw, so we have the platelets come to the rescue

and we see the blood clotting here

what we kind of thought we'd see at the beginning of the episode

essentially the blood clotting is a

load of chemical reactions that turn something that's soluble

in water, fibrinogen, so it can be transported around the body

to fibren, something insoluble

that forms this kind of net that we can see that covers

up the clot

Then lots of stuff gets stuck in that net

like the platelets and other cells to form a kind of plug

and to stop any blood-

any more blood from coming out of the blood vessel

Aw, we got a little bit of a brewing love story between the red

blood cell and the white blood cell

I feel bad telling you that... this stuff doesn't happen

And I like her little curved piece of hair she has here

I wonder if that's something relevant or not

That's right, I've been reading the comments

So they do show the plug that the fibrin sticks everything to in the end

So very good! Bravo!

Aw man, that's another fantastic episode

I hope you guys enjoyed my thoughts on it

I mean the show does such a great job with explaining

the medical science

Anyway, but if you want me to look at more episodes, then please give

this video a thumbs up and a comment

and subscribe to the channel as well because then you'll be notified

when I do the next one

Just, again, thank you so much for all the support on the first video

I was absolutely blown away by the response

and I really appreciate it, so I'll keep doing

as much content as I can, so

until next time

I'll see you soon