Intracellular Nanovesicles: their formation, transport and cargo

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Humans are built from lots of cells. Rather than being boring building blocks, the interior of each cell is a busy world where proteins are made and go to work, constantly moving around. This allows each cell to eat, drink, reproduce, and much more. We are interested in the cell's membrane trafficking system: a transport network of different types of membrane vesicles that important proteins can travel in. Membrane trafficking ensures that cargo proteins go to the right place at the right time. This keeps cells functioning healthily and normally. We recently found a new type of vesicle and we now want to understand it in more detail. These vesicles are called intracellular nanovesicles, or INVs for short. In cells, when a vesicle is formed, it gathers the proteins that it will take and buds from its origin. It must then be transported to its destination where it fuses with the target membrane. You can think of this as the vesicle's life cycle: they are born, they travel and then they die when they deliver their important cargo. In this project we want to document the life story of INVs. We will focus on their "early years". How are they born? How do they travel? Which friends do they carry along the way? Very little is known about INVs because they were only recently discovered. The details of the life story of INVs is likely to change how cell biologists think about the membrane traffic system.