At about the same time that Christian de Duve and his colleagues were describing the biochemistry of lysosomes (see “Catching sight of lysosomes” JCB 168:174), they biochemically identified (Baudhuin et al., 1965) and purified (Leighton et al., 1968) another enzyme-containing organelle. Initially the organelle was known as the microbody, and de Duve declined to give it a more specific name in 1965 because “too little is known of their enzyme complement and of their role in the physiology of the liver cells to substantiate a proposal at the present time” (Baudhuin et al., 1965). But in an abstract presented at the 1965 American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting and a year later in print (de Duve and Baudhuin, 1966), de Duve proposed that the new organelle be called a peroxisome, because it appeared to both generate and break down hydrogen peroxide.
Peroxisomes are almost...
