Scientists have observed a new mechanism of insertion for receptors in hippocampal neurons they term 'kiss and wait,' in which receptors emerge at the surface of the cell and appear to pause for up to thirty seconds before spreading laterally, according to a study appearing this week in Nature Neuroscience. The images produced in the study are the first to show individual trafficking events of receptor insertion into the plasma membrane of any cell type. "We're proposing, although this remains for further study, that these events then represent a distinct mode of membrane protein insertion that can occur in the plasma membrane," lead author Mark von Zastrow at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Scientist.Until now, scientists have struggled to elucidate the details of receptor insertion, because fluorescence techniques often have too high a signal-to-noise ratio to image single insertions. To overcome this technical obstacle, von...
total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF)Tim RyanRoberto MalinowThe Scientistsrothman@the-scientist.comNature Neurosciencehttp://www.nature.com/neurohttp://www.ucsf.edu/vonzast/z-lab_home.htmlThe Scientisthttp://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/15693/http://www-users.med.cornell.edu/~taryan/wwweb-docs/http://www.cshl.edu/public/SCIENCE/malinow.html
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