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Membrane trafficking

Building sites

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 5, page 515 (2004)Cite this article

Unlike its better-studied relative Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which lacks tER sites, P. pastoris is similar to mammalian cells in that it has well-organized tER structures from which COPII vesicles bud. It has therefore been a useful model organism in which to study tER organization. Previous work from this group had indicated that tER sites assemble by self-organization and, to understand this process better, the authors focused on Sec12.

Sec12 is a tER-localized protein and it is the guanine nucleotide-exchange factor for the GTPase Sar1, which is required to initiate the budding of COPII-coated vesicles. They found that Sec12-containing tER sites are stable entities, but that individual molecules of Sec12 in the tER sites rapidly exchange with Sec12 in other ER regions. In addition, they showed that the association of Sec12 with tER sites is saturable, which indicates that, rather than being targeted by self-association, Sec12 localizes to these sites through an as-yet-unidentified determinant.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Soderholm, J. et al. The transitional ER localization mechanism of Pichia pastoris Sec12. Dev. Cell 6, 649–659 (2004)

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FURTHER READING

  1. LaPointe, P., Gurkan, C. & Balch, W. E. Mise en place — this bud's for the Golgi. Mol. Cell 14, 413–414 (2004)

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  1. Associate Editor, Nature Cell Biology,

    Sowmya Swaminathan

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  1. Sowmya Swaminathan
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Swaminathan, S. Building sites. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 5, 515 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm1432

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