Why do prokaryotes not develop organelles? Is there a benefit to being more simple if you’re unicellular?
In: Biology
In the most general terms, there is always a benefit to being more simple in that every thing that an organism makes costs energy.
Prokaryotes are unicellular but all eukaryotes aren’t multicellular.
Setting aside if viruses are alive, all life is divided into two groups prokarya and eukarya. Prokaryotes are single celled organisms that have no nucleus, no membrane bound organelles and are much smaller than eukaryotes(less than a tenth of the size on average.) Prokaryotes are bacteria and archea. Most people are familiar with bacteria, archea are organisms that are like bacteria but just as distantly related to bacteria as eukaryotes are. So eukaryotes can be both unicellular and multicellular. Yeast are single celled fungi for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis
Above is a link explaining endosymbiosis which is the theory that organelles came from a cell engulfing another cell but then not digesting it. Basically, organelles were once free living organisms. Chloroplasts (organelle for photosynthesis) were once cyanobacteria.
It might be the case that organelles allow for multicellularity. All eukaryotes have mitochondria (one of those organelles). Mitochondria is where the vast majority of ATP (energy storage molecule of cells) is produced.
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