Does the endoplasmic reticulum have chemicals in it?

Question

i have a report due and i need to know if the ER in a cell have chemicals in it, digestive chemicals??

Answer 1

Nope. If you're talking about proteases (for protein digestion) inside the cell, those are located in the lysosomes. They need to be very carefully contained, or they'd digest all of the proteins in the cell. If a protein needs to be degraded, it makes its way into a vesicle that then fuses to a lysosome. The proteases get dumped inside where they degrade the protein.

Proteases are proteins themselves, so they'd need to be built in the rough ER. At this point, though, they are simply amino acid chains and are non-functional. They are transported to the golgi apparatus, where they are encapsulated in a vesicle where they can be folded and turned into functional proteases. One they have reached that point, their vesicle either becomes a lysosome, or fuses with one to deposit the proteases.