Vacuoles in Plants and Animals

[germany99]

Hello everyone!

I have a quick question:

Why are the vacuoles in plants very large, sometimes up to 90% of the cell area; versus the animal cell where they are very small but more frequent?

My guess is because they are non-specialized and they store mainly complex polysacharides which have enormous chains compared to amino acids in an animal cell.

Thanks for any feedback!

[mith]

the vacuole is mostly water in plants.

[JackBean]

IMHO that's because plants have no excretory system like animals, so in vacuoles there are plenty of things including many secondary metabolites...

[jessssxloveee]

In plant cells, the vacuole stores a lot of nutrients for the cell, so it needs to be a good size. In animals, the vacuole stores waste, and doesn't need to be as big.

[MrMistery]

i think I may have said this probably at least 100 times on this forum, but I'll say it again: animal cells have no vacuoles. The vacuole in plant, fungi and protozoan cells is nothing but a modified lysosome. In animal cells they are called lysosomes, are generally a lot smaller and have different roles. Why exactly plants have evolved to use a vacuole that is so big is probably a combination of using it to dump stuff and using it to maintain turgor. later the vacuole most likely evolved to also do the many complicated things it does nowadays...

[JackBean]

MrMistery, is this really important? Who the hell cares what you call a vacuole and what you don't call a vacuole?

[MrMistery]

it is important. you can call it whatever you want, but people seem to make a big confusion between a vacuole and a vesicle. i would have nothing against calling them lysosomes in all cells or calling them vacuoles in all cells. The reason they are called different is of course historic - dating back from the time people called everything round a vacuole. Now that we know what they are, it's important to make the distinction

[JackBean]

I see, you do not recognize your own sentence

[MrMistery]

excuse me? What might "recognize a sentence" mean?

[jwalin]

@Mr.Mistery

my text say that animals may have vacuoles but in that case they are temporary and extremly small.

[JackBean]

jwalin: and MrMistery says, that plant vacuoles and animal lysosomes are basically the same.

MrMistery: I took some your post about something similar and changed it little to fit here

[MrMistery]

@jwalin
that's just a wrong way of saying yet. Of course I can't say it's wrong because you can just change the definition of a vacuole and it's fine. But nowadays in cell biology we are done with identifying things by the way they look. We identify things based on their origins and the proteins they contain. And by those standards the animal cell lysosome and the plant vacuole are the same. What your book is referring is either
1. vesicles
2. some sort of intermediate in the endocytosis or exocytosis pathway, such as a multivesicular body or some other similarly strange structure.