A team led by Assistant Professor Lu Lei developed a method to image the Golgi. The trafficking and processing functions were found to localize to the rim and center of the Golgi stack.
Abstract
The Golgi complex is the major station for protein and lipid modification (processing) and sorting (transport). It comprises many tightly stacked membrane sacs, called cisternae. Under the light microscopy, the Golgi complex always appears as an entangled membrane aggregate, which is unresolvable even under a super-resolution microscope.
A new imaging method was developed to study the cisternal organization of a Golgi stack, the organizational unit of the Golgi complex. We found that the modification and sorting functions of the Golgi are separated to the interior and periphery of the Golgi stack. Our tool makes it possible to study the trafficking and modification of cargos within the Golgi complex.
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