It appears more often in French texts; however, it sometimes is used in referring to individual cells in ground tissues of types characterised as collenchyma.
[6] Apart from such difficulties, "glue cells" of various types commonly occur in taxa of animals that are practically unrelated to each other, and in such cases they are as a rule non-homologous and differ profoundly in their morphology, histology and function.
The Ctenophora use their colloblasts or collocytes in hunting and gathering food, in much the same way as members of the Cnidaria use cnidocytes; they keep the cells in a retracted form until they deploy them for securing prey.
In keeping with their food capturing function, the collocytes sometimes are called "lasso cells", but as is to be expected of common names, the term is not precise and is variously applied to both colloblasts and cnidocytes.
The collencytes are one of the classes of component cells of the sponges' tissue, loose mesenchyme between the ectoderm and the endoderm in the body wall.
[14] The functions of the collencytes are not yet fully understood; they are branched amoeboid cells and appear to produce collagen and play roles in forming sponge spicules.