About the Cover
On the Cover: Focus Issue on Membrane Trafficking
The cover illustrates recent advances and current and future concerns in membrane trafficking.Development in fluorescencebased microscopy has permitted overall views of the membrane trafficking apparatus, often in live cells, and accelerated functional assignments of molecules to specific endomembrane compartments. Left-hand panels are tobacco leaf epidermal cells coexpressing the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) marker ssGFP-HDEL and a YFP (in red) fusion to an Arabidopsis Sar1 (top), and the ER marker ssYFP (in red)- HDEL with the Golgi marker St-GFP (bottom). Together they provide an overall view of spatial and functional relationship between ER and Golgi. (Provided by Federica Brandizzi.) Electron tomography studies of samples processed by high-pressure freeze-fixation/freeze substitution provide high-resolution structural views of intracellular structures. The top right panel shows a three-dimensional tomography model image of an Arabidopsis Golgi stack and the late trans-Golgi network compartment, providing an image of the progressive maturation nature of the trans-Golgi network. (Provided by Byung- Ho Kang and L. Andrew Staehelin.) The bottom right panel shows brefeldin A (BFA)-sensitive constitutive cycling of the polar auxin transport protein (PIN1) between the basal plasma membrane and endosomal compartments in an Arabidopsis root segment. (Provided by Jiri Friml.) Recent and future efforts promise to uncover the functional roles of membrane trafficking to whole plant physiology and regulatory mechanisms that underlie the endomembrane system to meet the vesicular demands of cellular processes. The Focus Issue authors discuss recent advances and current efforts and suggest future research paths.
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Copyright © 2008 by the American Society of Plant Biologists
