Extracellular and intracellular digestion

Question

How different are extracellular and intracellular digestion? Describe the evolutionary benefit of extracellular digestion?

Answer 1

Intracellular digestion is that in which the breaking-down of macromolecules occurs in the cell. Extracellular digestion is that in which macro-molecules are broken down in places exterior the cell (that is, in extracellular space, in surrounds, in the lumen of digestive tubes and so on). The advent of extracellular digestion in evolution permitted organisms to profit from a big variety of food. The breaking down of bigger molecules into smaller ones exterior the cell allowed the use of other foods than those that, due the size/dimension of their molecules, could not be interiorized by the phagocytosis, diffusion or pinocytosis.