What you’ll learn to do: Compare prokaryotes and eukaryotes

In Introduction to Biology, we discussed the diversity of life on earth and mentioned how there are over 1.9 million species of living organisms on earth today. All these species of organisms have one of two different types of cells. In this section, we will compare the two cell types: prokaryotic and eukaryotic.

Within these two broad categories of cells, there are many diverse life forms. For example, both animal and plant cells are classified as eukaryotic cells, whereas all the many bacterial cells are classified as prokaryotic.