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What is the range of the number of individual organelles in a cell?

I am not a biologist but I understand that there's one nucleus and sometimes lots of mitochondria, so I am after the total number.

I understand that different types of cell will have a different number of Organelles in them, (e.g. there might be some very simple cells with 10 but there might be some with many more than that) but I am after the range with some examples. (I need references)

This is for a computational model.

Thanks very much

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  • $\begingroup$ This varies enormously between species, between eukaryotes and prokaryotes, plants and animals and within the cells of the same species. Also, what organelles are you interested in? Mitochondria? Chloroplasts? Lysosomes? Golgi? Vacuoles? Proteasomes? The list goes on... Have a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organelle $\endgroup$
    – terdon
    Apr 4, 2013 at 16:18
  • $\begingroup$ Yes @terdon definitely has a point. In fact, organelle concentration is very different even in different parts of a single cell. E.g. the axon terminals of neurons contain a lof ot mitochondria to provide ATP for continuous firing, while the cell soma (the main body, which can be more than 1m away) contains much fewer of them. Another case, most cells only have one nucleus. Certain cell types like skeletal and cardiac muscle or the placental trophoblasts however fuse and form multinucleated cells. $\endgroup$
    – Armatus
    Apr 4, 2013 at 16:57
  • $\begingroup$ @terdon I am aware that there are many different types of organelle. I am interested in the range of the total number of organelle (from the simplest cell to the most complex) $\endgroup$
    – RNs_Ghost
    Apr 4, 2013 at 19:40

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BioNumbers is a database that contains exactly this sort of stuff.

For example, I took this from this site:

Number of mitochondria per cell:

Yeast Cryptococcus neoformans cell: ~34

Human HELA cell: ~6000

Mouse L cell: ~1000

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  • $\begingroup$ that is a cool site! $\endgroup$
    – shigeta
    Apr 6, 2013 at 3:35

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