Though the artificial Golgi Dr Linhardt and his team have designed is much bigger than a cell, it is still small by the standards of human engineering, being built on what is known as a digital-fluidics chip.
So understanding the process (glycosylation, to give its proper name) is an important task, and Robert Linhardt, of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and his colleagues, hope to contribute by building an artificial Golgi apparatus.