How Do Cell Organelles Divide?

[gravenewworld]

This question has been bothering me for a while. When you learn about mitosis you learn about replication of DNA via specific enzymes. However, it is never fully explained just exactly how the rest of the cell is both told to divide and how it divides. I mean how do organelles like the golgi apparatus divide? They aren't made out of DNA. They are just a large macromolecule. How does the cell exactly copy an organelle?

 

[Coheda]

I believe they are constructed by the proteins that the Cell's DNA catalyzes.(Creates?)

 

[Dale]

Hi gravenewworld,

Coheda is correct. At the end of mitosis you have a single cell with two nucleii. The two nucleii separate and then the rest of the cell simply separates in a process called cytokinesis. At the end of cytokinesis some of the organelles are in one cell and some are in the other, but each cell has the necessary cellular machinery for making more organells as the cell grows or as old ones need replacement.

 

[gravenewworld]

Hi gravenewworld,

Coheda is correct. At the end of mitosis you have a single cell with two nucleii. The two nucleii separate and then the rest of the cell simply separates in a process called cytokinesis. At the end of cytokinesis some of the organelles are in one cell and some are in the other, but each cell has the necessary cellular machinery for making more organells as the cell grows or as old ones need replacement.

And what is this machinery? What specific enzymes synthesize organelles? My understanding that at the end of cytokinesis the cell divides completely. and is a fully functional cell that enters G1.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

I'm not a cell biologists, but IIRC, I remember hearing somewhere or other than the mechanism of how the golgi divides is one of the big unsolved questions in cell biology.