Phagocytosis

00:00 Let's talk about degrading big things.

00:02 So, this is phagocytosis.

00:03 And in a previous topic discussion, we briefly touched on the fact that eating big things from the outside world was a process called cell eating or phagocytosis.

00:14 And this is just an example.

00:15 What we're looking at here is a food particle, but it could also be a bacterium or a fungus or any variety of big things.

00:22 And we have cells that are capable of ingesting large things on the order of not much smaller than they are.

00:29 We have the food particle that goes in.

00:31 It goes into an intracellular vesicle, a vacuole, that will then fuse with lysosomes containing digestive enzymes that fusion is the next step, and then we get degradation of whatever it was that came in.

00:48 So, that's one of the important ways that phagocytosis helps us.

00:52 And for example, when we're dealing with infections, then we need to eat them, as we'll talk about in acute and chronic inflammation.

01:00 We will use exactly this pathway.

01:02 So, we will revisit this, and you'll see it again.

01:05 Okay, and then we have the exocytic vesicle, the other end getting rid of any undigested material.