Do various cells such as sperm cells and red blood cells alter their structure over their lifetimes or are there a lot of intermediary cells between how the started and the finished product? Sperm cells are formed from the meiosis of some diploid cell which I don’t know the name of. Following meiosis, does the cell grow a tail, or do the daugther cells slowly change over multiple cell divisions? Red blood cells start out as bone marrow cells. Does the nucleus get eaten?
spermatogenesis :
“The spermatids become embedded in the cytoplasm of Sertoli cells, and there undergo the distinctive changes which result in formation of spermatozoa. These morphological transformations include the conversion of the Golgi apparatus into the acrosome and progressive condensation of the chromatin in the nucleus. A centriole migrates to a position distal to the nucleus and begins organizing the axial filament which will form the motile tail of the sperm. Mitochondria may fuse to form a nebenkern as is the case for many vertebrates, or there may be less extensive fusion as in mammals. In all cases the resulting structures become located around the axial filament in the midpiece. The cytoplasm of the spermatid is reflected distally away from the nucleus during spermatid maturation; eventually, most of the cytoplasm is sloughed off and discarded.”