Can lysosomes be isolated from single cells?

Lysosomes are an important cellular organelle that receive and degrade macromolecules from the secretory, endocytic, autophagic, and phagocytic membrane-trafficking pathways. Defects in lysosome function lead to the development of disease with often-severe consequences to the individual. read more

There are cell sorting machines now, so it’d be a matter of isolating the cell that has the characteristics you want, and getting lysosomes from it. The tricky thing is that in preparing a lysate of a single cell, the techniques for separating organelles make it hard to see how you’d recover them quantitatively. read more

Sorting and assaying multiple lysosomes from the same cell shows the relative homogeneity of protein activity between different lysosomes, whereas the protein activity in single lysosomes from different cells of the same type is heterogeneous. read more

Hydrolytic enzymes are released which deactivate the toxins or kill the foreign body and these bits are eventually thrown out of the lysosomes into the cytoplasm in closed vesicles which ultimately find their way out of the cell by fusing with the cell membrane. read more