In general, there are 4 main cellular compartments, they are:
Compartments have three main roles. One is to establish physical boundaries for biological processes that enables the cell to carry out different metabolic activities at the same time. This may include keeping certain biomolecules within a region, or keeping other molecules outside. Within the membrane-bound compartments, different intracellular pH, different enzyme systems, and other differences are isolated from other organelles and cytosol. With mitochondria, the cytosol has an oxidizing environment which converts NADH to NAD+. With these cases, the compartmentalization is physical.
Another is to generate a specific micro-environment to spatially or temporally regulate a biological process. As an example, a yeast vacuole is normally acidified by proton transporters on the membrane.
A third role is to establish specific locations or cellular addresses for which processes should occur. For example, a transcription factor may be directed to a nucleus, where it can promote transcription of certain genes. In terms of protein synthesis, the necessary organelles are relatively near one another. The nucleolus within the nuclear envelope is the location of ribosome synthesis. The destination of synthesized ribosomes for protein translation is rough endoplasmic reticulum (rough ER), which is connected to and shares the same membrane with the nucleus. The Golgi body is also near the rough ER for packaging and redistributing. Likewise, intracellular compartmentalization allows specific sites of related eukaryotic cell functions isolated from other processes and therefore efficient.
Often, cellular compartments are defined by membrane enclosure. These membranes provide physical barriers to biomolecules. Transport across these barriers is often controlled in order to maintain the optimal concentration of biomolecules within and outside of the compartment.
The eukaryotic cell is thought to have arisen when an ancestral archaeal cell internalized an aerobic bacterium (the proto-mitochondrion). Mans et al.5 proposed that the evolutionary development of the eukaryotic cell nucleus was triggered by this archaeo-bacterial symbiosis. The nuclear envelope (membrane), a defining characteristic of the eukaryotic cell, was suggested to have arisen as an adaptation for segregating the original archaeal host DNA genome away from the proto-mitochondria, the main source of damaging reactive oxygen species.6
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Mans BJ, Anantharaman V, Aravind L, Koonin EV. Comparative genomics, evolution and origins of the nuclear envelope and nuclear pore complex. Cell Cycle. 2004 Dec;3(12):1612-37. doi: 10.4161/cc.3.12.1345. Epub 2004 Dec 20. PMID 15611647 ↩
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