Protoplasm

Protoplasm is the living content of a cell that is surrounded by a plasma membrane.Besides 'protoplasm', many other related terms and distinctions were used for the cell contents over time .These were as follows:The word 'protoplasm' comes from the Greek protos for first, and plasma for thing formed, and was originally used in religious contexts. It was used in 1839 by J. E. Purkinje for the material of the animal embryo. Later, in 1846 Hugo von Mohl redefined the term (also named as Primordialschlauch, 'primordial utricle') to refer to the 'tough, slimy, granular, semi-fluid' substance within plant cells, to distinguish this from the cell wall and the cell sap (Zellsaft) within the vacuole. Thomas Huxley (1869) later referred to it as the 'physical basis of life' and considered that the property of life resulted from the distribution of molecules within this substance. The protoplasm became an 'epistemic thing'. Its composition, however, was mysterious and there was much controversy over what sort of substance it was.Protoplasm is composed of a mixture of small molecules such as ions, amino acids, monosaccharides and water, and macromolecules such as nucleic acids, proteins, lipids and polysaccharides. In eukaryotes the protoplasm surrounding the cell nucleus is known as the cytoplasm and that inside the nucleus as the nucleoplasm. In prokaryotes the material inside the plasma membrane is the bacterial cytoplasm, while in Gram-negative bacteria the region outside the plasma membrane but inside the outer membrane is the periplasm.