BIOLOGISTS have worked out why some cells appear to lack crucial structures known as Golgi bodies.
These multi-layered structures help to add sugar molecules to proteins in a process called glycosylation, and it was assumed that organisms without Golgi bodies evolved before those that have them. But when Joel Dacks and colleagues at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, examined 鈥淕olgi-lacking鈥� organisms such as the gut bacterium Giardi intestinalis, they found a number of genes that in other cells are associated with trafficking proteins across Golgi bodies. This indicates that Golgi bodies once existed in such cells, but have since changed beyond recognition (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2003.0058).