Thank you everyone for taking the time to vote on my first poll. Of course the mighty macrophage wins! It is probably the coolest cell type I’ve encountered, and even after being obsessed with it for 7 years, I still don’t know it well enough!
Macrophages are white blood cells, they circulate in our blood and reside in pretty much all our organs. They are omnipresent and have adapted themselves too well to each environment. The blood macrophage looks completely different from those in the brain or the bone. 
The first thing I learnt about them was that they are phagocytes. They can eat an insane amount of stuff! Phagocytosis literally means ‘to eat cells’, so our first thought is this is the macrophage’s destiny!
When the particles are extremely small (nanometers – the size of our DNA and proteins), the cells take in a sample of the fluid surrounding the particles as well (called pinocytosis), to know exactly what’s going on in its surroundings.
The smallest particles they can eat are nanometers in size, this is the size of some viruses like the yellow fever virus. The largest particles they can eat are their own size – 20 micrometers! That's like the difference between eating one burger and 10,000 burgers at once!
So they can gobble up pretty much all the microorganisms that are a threat, and oh they do! They also eat dying cells that send an ‘eat me’ signal, or cells infected with viruses/bacteria or cancer cells! These cells are coated with proteins that tell the macrophage to attack!
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