The history of the organelles, their names, their functions is interesting and sometimes complex. Organelles, we so named because they reminded Karl Möbius of little organs inside of the cell. The Golgi was named after Camillo Golgi, the 1898 identifier of that organelle. The function of the Golgi was not discovered until much later. Ribosomes were first describe in the 1950s but their detailed structure and function wasn’t known until 2000. Three researchers shared the Noble Prize in Chemistry for this work in 2009.
It wasn’t until microscopes were available, of course, that work on cells and particularly internal structures of the cells were able to be identified and studied. The first microscopes, in the very late 1500s, were crude and it wasn’t until the mid 1600s that Robert Hooke and Antonie Leeuwenhoek started studies using them in earnest. And it wasn’t until the mid 1800’s that improvements to the microscope, particularly in the lenses, made them much more usable and available.
Still, that give us over 200 years to study the cell. We must know everything about it by now. But, the cell is small, very small. Ranging in size from 5 - 30 micrometers in diameter. A micrometer, or micron, is one millionth of a meter. I know, I know, you just rolled your eyes. I can’t comprehend sizes, large or small, when the term million is used either. Consider this, one piece of your hair is about 50 microns in diameter. So that largest of cells could be balanced on a hair. Now imagining looking inside a cell with its tiny parts.
There is much still to learn about what goes on inside a cell. Even though you thought that biology textbook covered all the parts to know, here is another one; the proteasome.
Proteasomes, degrades damaged proteins, or proteins not needed. They are in the cells or all eukaryotic organisms and archaea, but not bacteria. The job of degrading cell debris was thought once to be exclusively that of the lysosomes (another of those organelles you once learned) but alas the cell is more complex than we even now know. Proteasome were only discovered in 1977 and the diversity of their function is certainly not completely known. Discoverers of some major functional aspects of the proteasome were awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Why should we care about proteasomes? Well first, isn’t it just cool to know that there is still so much to learn about how a cell works. If that doesn’t convince you, how about: Alteration in the proteasome system, for example a decrease in function due to aging, is linked to several diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and cataract formation. Increased function is found in sepsis, some types of inflammation, and acidosis (body fluids get to acidic). In addition we can cause proteasomes inhibition, if this occurs, proteins build up in a cell and can lead to programmed cell death, called apoptosis.This pathway has been used in drugs to treat cancer, in effect forcing cancer cells to kill themselves off.
For an organelle your biology textbook didn’t even cover, its a pretty important organelle.