M.Ed., Stanford University
Winner of multiple teaching awards
Patrick has been teaching AP Biology for 14 years and is the winner of multiple teaching awards.
The Golgi apparatus, also known as Golgi body or Golgi complex, is an organelle commonly found in eukaryotic cells. The Golgi apparatus is made up of membrane-bound stacks and is responsible for production of lysosomes, which aid in digestion.
The Golgi apparatus or Golgi complex or Golgi bodies whatever you learn today is one of the reasons that I tell kids to get into Science because if you really want to be famous don't become a basketball player or movie star because several decades later chances are nobody remembers you anymore. However, Science students for the rest of eternity will have to memorize and recall Golgi's name because he was the one who discovered the cellular organelle called the Golgi apparatus.
Now what it does is a a series of thin flattened sacks that takes in proteins that have been sent to it by the rough endoplasmic reticulum in small secretory vesicles and it modifies those proteins and then wraps them, up in a new membrane sacks to be dumped out of the cell.
If we take a quick look over here, we can see "hey there's the Golgi apparatus and here's the rough ER" and you can see slowly some small sacks here heading towards it and here we see a little bit better some of the transport of small little sacks and the contents inside of those to the golgi apparatus, now often those sacks are then sent off to the cell membrane or plasma membrane where they're dumped outside of the cell, so this could be like in one the cells lining your, say your stomach that is dumping out some of the chemical so that it uses to dump to break down food such as pepsinogen.
Now if we go back over here. Lysosomes are one of the more commonly made organelles by the golgi apparatus they're very important for cellular function because these small sacks are filled with digestive enzymes and there the enzymes that break down larger chunks of food so that the metabolic processes of aerobic respiration et cetera can breakdown these large chunks into smaller chunks and release the energy.
These digestive sacks are also used to breakdown organelles that have been damaged or are no longer needed. They're also used by say your white blood cells after that white blood cells endocytosis and sucked in [IB] bacteria once that bacteria is inside, lysosomes are sent to that sack that the bacteria is inside and enzymes once they're joined with the bacteria they rip it apart, so in this respect the golgi apparatus and lysosomes together help form one of the major metabollic functions of the cell.
