Lysosomes
Lysosomes are digestive vesicles that arise from the Golgi apparatus. They contain high levels of a vareity of enzymes that can degrade proteins, nucleic acids, lipids and carbohydrates. The lysomesal…
Golgi apparatus
The Golgi Apparatus consists of one or more stacks of disc shaped cisternae, each stack organized as a series of at least 3 functionally distinct compartments, called, cis, medial, and trans…
Basal lamina & extracellular matrix
The extracellular matrix is composed of a variety of proteins and polysaccharides that are secreted locally and assembled into an organized meshwork in close association with the surface of the…
Endosomes
Calthrin-coated vesicles: The major protein component is clathrin. A second major coat protein of clathrin coated vesicles is adaptin which is required to bind the clathrin coat to the membrane and to trap various…
Endoplasmic reticulum
The ER is organized into many branching tubules and flattened sacs extending throughout the cytosol. Its membrane usually constitutes more than 1/2 of the total membrane of an average animal…
Organelles
Extracellular Vesicles (EVs): See also Drug delivery using exosomes Mammalian cells normally secrete two types of EVs, smaller vesicles of about 30-200 nm that are commonly referred to as exosomes,…
Fertilization
See also cell development. Asexual Reproduction Organisms can reproduce without sex. For example, there are species of lizards that consist only of females and reproduce without matting. Such asexual reproduction…
Nervous system
One of the major features of vertebrates which do not have any counterpart in say Drosophila is the formation of a notochord. A picture of this formation is illustrated with the frog, zenopus laevis. Here,…
Fruit fly
Principles of Development as Learned through the Fly Much of the basic principles of has been learned through the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Some of these basic principles are illustrated here: Importance…
Embryogenesis
Embryogenesis starts out with the fertilized egg which divides or cleaves to form many smaller cells (blastomeres) without any change in total mass. The determinants distributed asymmetrically in the egg…