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Discovery Research Institute Molecular Membrane Biology Laboratory Chief Scientist, Dr. Akihiko Nakano |
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| New mechanistic evidence for the protein trafficking in the organelle, the Golgi apparatus, supporting "the cisternal maturation model" | |
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Cell is the smallest unit of life. Vitality of the cell depends on properly organized organelle functions. Each organelle is enclosed by membrane and performs specific task in the cytoplasm. The Golgi apparatus is one such organelle, involved in sorting and trafficking of proteins produced in the cell. There has been a debate, however, for a long period of time how essential cargo proteins traverse the Golgi apparatus, despite lots of efforts by many researchers. Mainly two trafficking models, the vesicular transport model and the cisternal maturation model, have been proposed and disputed. Molecular Membrane Biology Laboratory in Discovery Research Institute has developed the world's highest-performance confocal laser scanning microscopic system, which can image directly the nano-scale world of living cells; the temporal and spatial resolution exceeds the long-standing limitation of optical microscopy. By use of the new microscopic system, critical evidence for the mechanism of protein trafficking was provided; that is, not only cisternae mature over time conveying cargo proteins but also dynamic membrane segregation plays a role in the sorting. The system enables the direct nano-scale imaging of live cells, and, therefore, will contribute to solve a variety of questions of life science. The research details are reported in the reference: Nature (advanced online publication on May 15th) (2006). |
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