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The Vesicles Transport Hormones, Enzymes, and Chemicals Essay

Decent Essays

The human body is a complex structure that contains billions and billions of small living cells. Each of these cells houses many structures that function together to run the body. Some of these structures are the endoplasmic reticulum, the nucleus, the mitochondria, lysosomes, the cell membrane and many more. Scientists were able to explain the processes in which most of these structures carry out to run the body, but it wasn’t until this year, 2013, that the scientific world was introduced to the process in which small cellular bodies called vesicles transport hormones, enzymes and other chemicals through out the cell. The 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology was awarded to three researchers

who used their knowledge and …show more content…

Much of this process is done by the Golgi apparatus, one of the essential organelles of a living cell. The Golgi complex contains a numerous number of these vesicles. These vesicles are then used to transport different molecules to the cellular membrane. At the cellular membrane, these vesicles are then excreted. Larger secretory that are found are used for selective excretion. Furthermore, the vesicles mediate the sorting of molecules because the Golgi apparatus is responsible for controlling molecular traffic in the cell6. Overall, the role of the vesicles is to

transport molecules within the cell. The explanations that have won this year’s Nobel Prize unsolved the mysteries that explain the mechanism of how this is done.
Back in the 1970’s, Dr. Schekman used what is known as genetic screening, or a new technology at that time, to observe yeast cells that had dysfunctional transport system because those cells would have a shortage of enzymes and proteins. This allowed Dr. Schekman to compare the dysfunctional yeast cells to a normal one. He was then able to isolate three different classes of genes that caused the shortage of materials.1 With this experiment, he was able to identify 23 genes that can be categorized into those three different classes of genes, although at first, he only found two genes that he called sec1 and sec2. He also found that the sec17 and sec18 are the mutants that participant in vesicle fusion. Theses works allowed Schekman to

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