Vesicular transport and the Golgi apparatus in yeast

Eukaryotic cells have developed a complex intracellular membrane system to divide the cell into various compartments where specific biochemical reacti ons are efficiently conducted locally. They also have developed systems to deliver appropriate materials to each specific compartment, Vesicular trans port is a delivery system that also links most of the main organelles in th e cell. The Golgi apparatus occupies the central position of the traffic be tween the endoplasmic reticulum and the endosome/vacuole/plasma membrane by maturating and sorting delivery of materials. Every important feature of v esicular transport has been identified by studying the Golgi apparatus, and the unicellular microorganism Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been an extreme ly excellent material for this study. Cycles of production and consumption of the transport vesicles by sorting the cargo, budding from the donor, tet hering, docking and fusion to the target can now be explained to a targe ex tent at the molecular level. The functional and structural aspects of the G olgi have also been well studied in the last decade.