This summary is based on the 3rd edition of Essential Cell Biology from Alberts et al. The remaining chapters can be accessed when logged in and can be found here: Second part of the summary Cells are the fundamental units of life; all living things are made of cells. The present-day cells are believed to have evolved from an ancestral cell that excited more than 3 billion years age. Cells vary enormous in appearance and function, however all living cells have a similar basic chemistry.With the invention of the microscope, it became clear that plants and animals are assemblies of cells, that cells can also exist as independent organisms, and that cells individually are living in the sense that they can grow, reproduce, convert energy from one form into another, respond to their environment, and so on. Although cells are varied when viewed from the outside, all living things are fundamentally similar inside. And in all living things, genetic instructions, called genes, are stored in DNA molecules. In every cell, the instructions in the DNA are read out, or transcribed, into a chemically related set of molecules made of RNA. The messages carried by the RNA molecules are in turn translated into yet another chemical form: they are used to direct the synthesis of a huge variety of large protein molecules that dominate the behaviour of the cell....