Organelle · no membrane

Centrosome

The organiser

In view

Microtubules sprout from the glowing sleeve around the mother centriole and stream toward the edge of the cell.

The cell’s main microtubule-organising centre. At its heart sit two loosely linked centrioles, each a barrel of nine triplet microtubules arranged like a pinwheel; only the older one carries appendages that hold microtubules. Before division each grows a new centriole at right angles. A layered sleeve of pericentriolar material around the older one launches new microtubules.

It duplicates exactly once per cell cycle, and the two copies become the poles of the mitotic spindle.

Centriole

≈ 250 × 500 nm

Build

9 triplets, pinwheel

New ones

Grow at right angles

Copies

Once per cell cycle

Did you know?

A centriole can move to the membrane and become a basal body, the base of a cilium that senses the world outside the cell.

Sources

1. The Golgi and the centrosome: building a functional partnership · Sütterlin & Colanzi 2010 · J Cell Biol
2. Subdiffraction imaging of centrosomes reveals higher-order organizational features of pericentriolar material · Lawo et al. 2012 · Nat Cell Biol
3. Centriole structure · Winey & O'Toole 2014 · Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
4. Who are you, subdistal appendages of centriole? · Uzbekov & Alieva 2018 · Open Biol
5. Once and only once: mechanisms of centriole duplication and their deregulation in disease · Nigg & Holland 2018 · Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol
6. Regulating the transition from centriole to basal body · Kobayashi & Dynlacht 2011 · J Cell Biol