The cell’s post office
The Golgi apparatus modifies, sorts and packages.
Letters and parcels
A post office receives parcels, sorts them, packs them and sends each one to the right place.
What might a cell’s “post office” do?
What this lesson covers
The idea
The Golgi apparatus, stacks of flattened sacs linked to the ER and cell membrane, acts as the cell's post office: it modifies, sorts and packages proteins and lipids into vesicles for transport, secretion or lysosome formation.
Letters and parcels
A post office receives parcels, sorts them, packs them and sends each one to the right place.
What might a cell’s “post office” do?
- Modify, sort and package materials, then send them on
- Make all the cell’s energy
- Keep the cell’s DNA
Follow a parcel
Choose a destination. Slide the journey forward.
Golgi apparatus
The Golgi apparatus, stacks of flattened sacs, is linked to the ER, the cell membrane and other organelles. It acts like the cell’s post office: it modifies, sorts and packages proteins and/or lipids into vesicles for transport, secretion, or lysosome formation.
Camillo Golgi first saw it in 1898 in nerve cells of a barn owl. Early microscopes could not show it clearly, so many doubted it, until the electron microscope confirmed it.
- Step | What happens
- Arrives | proteins and lipids come from the ER
- Modify, sort, package | in the Golgi apparatus
- Leaves in a vesicle | to transport, to secretion, or to form a lysosome
Notes
The Golgi apparatus (stacked sacs) is the cell’s post office: it modifies, sorts and packages proteins and lipids into vesicles for transport, secretion or lysosome formation.
Check yourself
The Golgi apparatus acts like the cell’s…
The Golgi apparatus packages proteins and lipids into…
Which is not a destination for Golgi vesicles?
Who first observed the Golgi apparatus, in 1898?
- post office — correct. Yes. It modifies, sorts and packages.
- power station. That is the mitochondrion.
- control room. That is the nucleus.
- vesicles — correct. Yes.
- chromosomes. Chromosomes are in the nucleus.
- cell walls. It makes vesicles.
- Into the nucleus to become a chromosome — correct. Not named. The three are transport, secretion and lysosome formation.
- Secretion out of the cell. It is a destination.
- Transport to other organelles. It is a destination.
- Lysosome formation. It is a destination.
- Camillo Golgi — correct. Yes, in nerve cells of a barn owl.
- Robert Hooke. Hooke saw cork cells in 1665.
- Matthias Schleiden. Schleiden worked on plants.