Cell complexity: membrane ingestion (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, January 19, 2015, 15:34 (3386 days ago) @ David Turell

How the membrane ingests is only partially known:-"Their new study, published in Nature Communications, shows that the threshold at which proteins succeed at making a vesicle depends on both the quantity of membrane-bending proteins and the tension in the membrane itself. As tension on the membrane decreases, fewer proteins are needed to reach that critical mass.-"Calculating where this threshold is in a given cell would be useful for understanding many biological processes. Many diseases disrupt normal endocytosis, so altering this threshold might prove to be a basis for future treatments. -"This relationship between protein activity and membrane tensions may also help explain the recently discovered "ultrafast endocytosis" pathway, in which cells are sometimes able to form a vesicle in a few milliseconds, thousands of times faster than usual." -
 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-01-relationship-critical-cells-ingest.html#jCp