Thin section electron micrograph of purified COPII vesicles generated from yeast endoplasmic reticulum membrane and pure yeast COPII proteins. Randy Schekman, University of California, Berkeley and Lelio Orci, University of Geneva Switzerland
C. Lord et al., “Sequential interactions with Sec23 control the direction of vesicle traffic,” Nature, 473:181-86, 2011. Free 1000 Evaluation.
Transport vesicles deliver cargo to various targets inside the cell, “but if the vesicle goes to the wrong place,” says Susan Ferro-Novick, at the University of California, San Diego, “you have a mess on your hands.” She and her colleagues discovered that a coat of vesicle proteins called COPII, which is responsible for choosing what goes into each vesicle, also serves as the address label that gets the vesicle to the right place in the cell.
Many researchers believed that SNARE proteins, which help vesicles dock to target membranes, acted as address labels. The problem is that SNAREs aren’t very picky about which other SNAREs ...
