Talk:Organelle

message: Which organelles are not bounded by membranes.
:None?  --G3pro 12:38, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: If you call the cytoskeletton an organelle, it is not membrane-bound. Neither Ribosomes are bound by membranes nor is the centrioles. --Eribro 17:35, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Done. Since the page is protected due to vandalism rather than an edit war, it's fine for admins to make minor fixes. -- Hadal 04:48, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: "An organelle is is to the cell what an organ is to the body (hence the name ORGANelle)." I Hope it made things clearer. --Eribro 17:21, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Old comments 

message: I thought only plant cells had vakoules, the picture shows one and it's supposed to be a picture of an animal cell. Does animal cells have vakuoles? --Eribro 17:33, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Animal cells do not have vacuoles, the vacuolar equivalent are the lysosomes. See this  chapter of the textbook "Molecular Biology of the Cell" (also cited as a reference for the article).--Biologos 13:22, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Vesicle/Vacuole

message: This definition of Organelle is strongly misleading or the list of organelles is incomplete. I understand the reasoning behind the idea of including also some non membrane-enclosed organelles such as centrioles.
But to entitle ribosomes as organelles reaches out to far. First of all, their number (100000 to 10000000 per cell) is a major difference.
Secondly, what about proteasomes? Degradosomes? Chaperones? Members of each family are comparable in size and importance, yet they are not considered as organelles.
Defining 'organelle' seems surprisingly difficult - literature is not united on that. But to include protein complexes, just because they are large and have a certain function, doesn't make the definition of 'organelle' useful at all. --141.61.1.25 14:02, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd have agreed with that before I found out about carboxysomes, but now the boundary is a bit blurred for me. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:35, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: If carboxysome is organelle, then any protein-only coated virus inside the cell is an organelle too... Actually it's even more complicated, as any virus contains genetic material (RNA, DNA) and therefore could be even "equal" to mitochondria or chloroplasts. Did not the cell biologists by now agree what is organelle and what is not? Kazkaskazkasako (talk) 20:34, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: A carboxysome is an organelle. A virus is not an organelle, as it is by definition a cellular parasite that can be in any other cell, whereas the carboxysome is associated and encoded by the bacterial cell at hand. 2A02:8388:1643:D680:663F:A873:E90A:DE2A (talk) 12:50, 26 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ribosomes are organelles? 

message: Thanks to the help of R. S. Shaw and several others on :de:Diskussion:Organell and some digging through the literature I was able to compile a short history of the term organelle and its definition over time for the German Wikipedia (see :de:Organell). I think it helps a lot to cope with the question of how organelles are defined, i.e. does a structure need to have a membrane to be an organelle. My conclusion is that two different definitions are currently in use and both should be reflected in the article. Accordingly the German organelle article got a complete make over (I am not planning to do this here, though). The tables in English version helped a lot to get this done in a reasonable (well, ) amount of time. 
Anyway, to get back to the point, I felt I should give back to the English speaking and international community by translating the respective chapter and here it is. A problem that arose is that the new part does not really fit into the structure of the rest of the article. Which is suffering from the definition problem anyway and thus could use a make over.... Obviously, my selection of text books cited is leaning to German ones, maybe not appropriate for the English version. Feel free to improve this or my English, it's a wiki. 
In case you care, I found the following structure helpful to reorganize the German Organell article: 
:membrane bound organelles 
::semi autonomous Os
::other frequent membrane bound Os.
:::animal cells
:::plant cells
::specialized  membrane bound Os
:::cell type specific Os from multicellular beings
:::Species specic Os from protists and mosses
:eukaryotic Os w/o membrane 
:procaryotic Os
--Dietzel65 22:23, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: By the way, I'm coming around to the idea that "membrane bound" should be avoided, using "membrane enclosed" or "membrane bounded" instead.  The problem is that bound normally means attached to, and is used this way in biology, as in the phrase "membrane bound protein".  If one accepts that "organelle" may include non-membrane-enclosed things, then those things might well be attached to a membrane (and thus be membrane-bound).  One could imagine a membrane-enclosed structure attached to a separate membrane (perhaps that's fantastic, but why add confusion?).  And if one were to say that if it's a membrane-enclosed organelle than the word bound means enclosed by but if the context is other things like proteins, then bound means attached to, the problem is that it presumes that the reader already knows what is meant; if he does not, he is totally lost by the usage rather than being informed by it.  Hence I'm thinking of changing most usages to "membrane-enclosed". -R. S. Shaw 01:02, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think this clarification (membrane enclosed/bounded/bound/...[some of them with DNA/RNA some of them wihout] vs. without membrane) is very useful, but on the other hand calling all (biological) macromolecular complexes (those without membrane) organelles is not the clearest way. Because calling only some of these ("important", protein producing...) (macro)molecular complexes organelles while others are called plainly (macro) molecular complexes, or just proteins made from many proteins or ribo-nuclear particles or RNA-protein complexes, or what-not... Because why should ribosome be an organelle while spliceosome, proteasome (and many other -somes & large macromolecular complexes), or even Titin (a single large protein!) be NOT called organelle? Or even why not the single chromosome (made of DNA+protein+(maybe RNA?, or some other like lipids?, inorganics?)) be called "organelle"? Then any stained thing in a cell could be called organelle, and when it would be possible to stain any single protein/RNA/DNA/lipid/... of interest in the cell very specifically, then these will be called organelles as well? Just my random thoughts about this "developing" definition and the fact that there are at least two major definitions with some minor qualifications (like DNA containing lipid compartments). Kazkaskazkasako (talk) 11:38, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Word History and Definitions 

message: The first paragraph of "Examples" contains two statements I would like to discuss: 
*'While most cell biologists consider the term organelle to be synonymous with "cell compartment" '. As a cell biologist, I would argue that this is plain wrong, meaning: whoever wants to make this statement should cite robust references that 'most' cell biologists think so. A compartment is some sort of reaction room, e.g. the inside of Mitochondria, all right. However, I found one text book definition that said the respective compartment would be the sum of all respective rooms within a cell, i.e. there may be many Mitochondria in one cell, but only one mitochondrial compartment. The cytoplasma is a compartment but not an organelle. The interchromatin compartment in the nucleus is not an organell. Flagella may be defined as organelles but I doubt they can be regarded as compartments. 
*'other cell biologists choose to limit the term organelle to include only those which are DNA-containing'. Is there any reference for this? We had a discussion about this on :de:Diskussion:Organell but nobody could come up with a citeable source. So we dropped it for the time being. If substantiable, I think it should be incorporated in the previous chapter about terminology.
--Dietzel65 16:09, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If you get around to the rewriting you may also want to have a look at a paper that suggests that Centrosomes have an RNA Genome: . Maybe they are semiautonomous after all... --Dietzel65 23:20, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Does the fact that their cnRNAs do not show sequence similarity to RNAs from most other organisms with  centrosomes suggest that these are not likely to be more than some kind of molecular fossil? Could a reverse transcriptase provide enough genetic stability for an autonomous genetic component of an organelle? --JWSchmidt 01:31, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, it could be that this centrosomal RNA is homologous to centrosomal RNAs in other Organisms which is just not yet discovered. I would assume that the group who has published the article is working on that right now. If there is more to it than an obscure finding in an obscure organism, we should see more articles about it in the upcoming years. Concerning the reverse transcriptase, I don't see why there would be a problem with stability? --Dietzel65 21:25, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Reverse transcriptase is a rather error-prone polymerase. --JWSchmidt 04:29, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Compartment and DNA containing 

message: In the table of Major eukaryotic organelles, I inserted into the Chloroplast row the fact that kleptoplastic organisms are counted among plants and protists as containing chloroplasts. But because they are an unusual exception, I included it in small, parenthetical text. I found this to be permissible because 1) it is true and 2) it does not say anywhere that we are only allowed to list organisms which contain the organelle at birth. Kleptoplastic organisms may not be born with chloroplasts, but they do contain them and instead of consuming them, use them beneficially. Blue Danube (talk) 04:50, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chloroplasts in kleptoplastic organisms 

message: Short question: Should not Granule (cell biology) have a note in thie article? Hubba (talk) 13:45, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Granule (cell biology) 

message: The following content is someone's WP:OR, where the history is constructed from WP:PRIMARY sources.  We don't do this in WP.  
It would take several years before organulum, or the later term organelle, became accepted and expanded in meaning to include subcellular structures in multicellular organisms. Books around 1900 from Valentin Häcker, Edmund Wilson
and Oscar Hertwig still referred to cellular organs. Later, both terms came to be used side by side: Bengt Lidforss wrote 1915 (in German) about "Organs or Organells"; also found in: 
Around 1920, the term organelle was used to describe propulsion structures ("motor organelle complex", i.e., flagella and their anchoring) and other protist structures, such as ciliates.Cl. Hamburger, Handwörterbuch der Naturw. Bd. V,. p. 435. Infusorien. cited after 
Alfred Kühn wrote about centrioles as division organelles, although he stated that, for Vahlkampfias, the alternative 'organelle' or 'product of structural build-up' had not yet been decided, without explaining the difference between the alternatives.
In his 1953 textbook, Max Hartmann used the term for extracellular (pellicula, shells, cell walls) and intracellular skeletons of protists.
Later, the now widely usedNultsch, Allgemeine Botanik, 11. Aufl. 2001, Thieme VerlagWehner/Gehring, Zoologies, 23. Aufl. 1995, Thieme VerlagAlberts, Bruce et al. (2002). The Molecular Biology of the Cell, 4th ed., Garland Science, 2002, . online via "NCBI-Bookshelf"
Brock, Mikrobiologie, 2. korrigierter Nachdruck (2003), der 1. Aufl. von 2001
definition of organelle emerged, after which only cellular structures with surrounding membrane had been considered organelles.
However, the more original definition of subcellular functional unit in general still coexists.Strasburgers Lehrbuch der Botanik für Hochschulen, 35. Aufl. (2002), p. 42
In 1978, Albert Frey-Wyssling suggested that the term organelle should refer only to structures that convert energy, such as centrosomes, ribosomes, and nucleoli. This new definition, however, did not win wide recognition.
Am copying this here in case anyone wants to re-work it based on one or more sources that describe the history of the use of the term. Jytdog (talk) 13:14, 1 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[WP:OR]] 

message: The introduction to the organelle is concise, and very easy to follow along with.  The article has a nice flow throughout, which makes it very easy to read, and the charts listing the different major and minor organelles really helps in the overall organization.  There are a few issues that I ran across though in reading through the article.  Even though all of the information presented was relevant to the article, there were a few items that I feel should be omitted for clarity. Looking specifically at the section dealing with most biologists say organelle is synonymous with cell compartment, and some biologists refer to organelles as only those that contain DNA, these claims seem to be very broad. The claim that other biologists believe only those containing DNA are organelles, also seems to be a claim with very little evidence to support.  In looking at several dictionaries and other reliable sources, no real evidence was found for the claim, and I felt this was a distraction in the article.  In looking at the sources for the article, the sources seemed very reliable, but more up to date sources could really help in the improvement of this article.  In just the last few years, the term organelle in itself seems to have been a term that is very difficult to pinpoint a precise definition of.  Since the newest source in this article is from 2009, a look at the new definitions and standards of an organelle could greatly improve the quality of the article.  Also, recent research and publications on organelle properties could help better distinguish what properties should determine the definition of an organelle.  For instance, a more well rounded, textbook defined definition of the term organelle, could greatly improve the opening of this article.  Overall, I found the article very easy to understand, but with a better defined definition of organelle, the omission or rephrasing of the opening paragraph in the types of organelles section, and more up to date sources for organelle properties, this article could continue to be improved.Perdue104 (talk) 01:14, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Review

message: Reading through this article I feel that there are both good and bad qualities. The article is easy to follow and contains important sources that pertain to the subject at hand. Reading prior comments I agree with Shaw, that the term "membrane bound" should be omitted and replaced by another term such as "membrane bounded" or "membrane enclosed" <R.S.Shaw></R.S.Shaw>. Another improvement that could be made would be to clarify vital concepts such as the main definition of an organelle. The definition in this article seems to be vague and could be specified by prior research findings. I think it would be highly beneficial for dictionaries and research projects to be addressed and utilized toward a citeable, substantial term. I also think a vital addition to this article would be to add a labelled photo of a plant cell along with that of the animal cell. Overall, I think that this is an informative article. The only thing that I could think of enhancing would be the pinpointed organelle clarifications and older educational sources. Gabrielle Worley (talk) 03:39, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Review

message: The opening paragraphs of this article is critical to introducing the significance to organelles in cell biology. The article had great great flow of introductory information. However, I am on agreeable terms with the <Perdue104></Perdue104>. The article seems to have trouble determining a predominant definition to an organelle. Something that could improve on this cycle would be to omit statements that just seem like speculation of scientist with more scholarly valued statements. Most of this articles are cite with with the information pertained to the article. However, science is constantly developing and discovering new ways to explain underlying properties in cell biology. In <Perdue104></Perdue104>, I can only partially agree with the statements about updating some sources supporting the article. Specifically, in the the history of the organelles it is significant to retract to primitive attributes that helped illuminate the discovery. As a general article of organelles, it is appropriate to keep a general idea of what organelles are. Though, one suggestion could be the introduction between proteins and organelles, it could be interpreted as irrelevant to the article considering it introduces it in a couple of sentences. The statements could be best represented in the historical section of the article instead of its own section or expanded on its relation. This review is just critical analysis for an assignment in a cell biology course. Most of what is being reviewed is some suggestions to be looked at to improve the scholars reliability on the article.
Smith2152 (talk) 03:02, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Review

message: Apparently there was an edit war, so I am suggesting that the admins make it so that only confirmed accounts can edit it. Thanks  Captain Chicky (talk) 18:50, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vandalism  

message: The tables are divided into Major and minor, but there seems to be no description of what this means.  Please add a statement giving some idea of what it means, even if it is kind of subjective.  Or alternately change the titles to be more descriptive, such as "Most common in number", or "Most universal among all Eukaryotic cells", or "most critical in function", or whatever the meaning is. DKEdwards (talk) 21:16, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Eukaryotic organelles ("Major/minor")