Cell Cycle Changes to the Golgi Apparatus in Animal Cells

Abstract

Dramatic changes occur to the morphology of the Golgi apparatus at the onset of mitosis in animal cells (Warren, 1985, 1993) and figure 1 provides a schematic view of this process. The compact, juxta-nuclear reticulum found in interphase cells is converted, during prophase, to several hundred discrete Golgi stacks. This is thought to occur by scission of the tubules that connect equivalent cisternae in adjacent stacks (Rambourg and Clermont, 1990; Rothman and Warren, 1994). During the middle phases of mitosis (prometaphase, metaphase and anaphase), each stack undergoes complete vesiculation to yield Golgi clusters (Lucocq et al, 1987; Lucocq and Warren, 1987). These clusters then shed vesicles which become dispersed throughout the mitotic cell cytoplasm (Lucocq et al., 1989). During telophase, these processes are reversed; clusters grow by accretion of vesicles which then fuse to reform Golgi stacks. The dispersed stacks then move to the peri-centriolar region, probably by movement along microtubules (Ho et al, 1989; Corthésy-Theulaz et al, 1992), where they undergo homotypic fusion to re-form the interphase Golgi apparatus (Lucocq et al., 1989). The end result of this stochastic process is that the original mother Golgi apparatus is equally distributed between the two daughter cells (Birky, 1983).