Word: duve
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...inflammatory chemicals are enzymes, the organic catalysts that mediate reactions between other body substances and, in some cases, destroy them. Perhaps the most potent are the acid hydrolases, some of which dissolve proteins and nucleic acids. Where they were kept was a mystery until 1955, when Dr. Christian de Duve at the Catholic University of Louvain deduced from their behavior that they must be stored in some particles inside the cells. Though nobody had yet seen the particles, he named them lysosomes (dissolving bodies...
Electron microscopists have since photographed lysosomes, and Dr. de Duve, now at Rockefeller University, has figured out some of the ways they work (see diagram). In a typical case, a foreign particle (it may be a virus, a bacterium or a chemical) reaches the side of a cell and is sucked in, sealed off by a piece of the cell's own membrane. Standing by inside the cell is a lysosome, packed with enzymes. Lysosome and invader, now packaged in a phagosome, are drawn together and fuse. In the resulting sac, called a vacuole, the foreign substance is digested...