March 29, 2022
In intro biology, we’re taught a whole list of organelles: ribosomes, nuclei, the Golgi apparatus, endoplasmic reticulum, lysosome, peroxisome, mitochondria, chloroplast, cell wall, etc. However, we rarely learn about the vault organelle; I don’t think that I’ve run into anyone who knows of it. And honestly, it freaks me out - we have organelles floating around in us that we don’t know about. And for the vault, it’s worse; we don’t really know what they do.
We don’t exactly know what these organelles do. We know that they look similar to a soup can, and that they are composed very large proteins. There are species which don’t have these, but they are few and far between - of note is that several species we perform experiments on, such as fruit flies, do not have vaults. However, since this organelle keeps popping up, we can assume that they’re important for something, we just don’t know what. When the genes for the vault are disabled in mice, the vault-deficient mice are not different in most cases than the control population.
They could be involved in cellular transport; their structure is certainly suggestive of it, but we don’t know for sure - clearly other things are able to transport what the vault does by evidence of the mice. However, there are more vault organelles in some cancer cells, especially those that are resistant to chemotherapy. In zebrafish, they seem to help regenerate nervous tissue after injury. Clearly, this doesn’t happen in humans. They also interact with telomeres, but again, don’t seem necessary as mice without vaults age normally.
We’ll know what vaults do someday, and they’ll probably be helpful - they’re currently being investigated to deliver drugs to parts of the body more efficiently. But they serve as a reminder that we don’t know what’s going on, even within our own bodies, and we have a long way to go in all fields. There are many more things to be discovered.
On February 27, 2022, I thought it would be a great idea to create some sort of content - writing, art, coding, etc. - every day of the next month. Luckily, the alliteration worked out. This should be the twenty-ninth post in the series.