细胞功能测定

During fertilization in Chlamydomonas, adhesion and fusion of gametes occur at the tip of specialized regions of the plasma membrane, known as mating structures (1,2). The mating type minus (mt) structure is a slightly raised dome-shaped region located at the apical end of the cell body. In contra ...

Cell fusion is a very dynamic process in which the entire membrane and cellular contents of two or more cells merge into one. Strategies developed to understand the component processes that make up a full fusion event require imaging to be performed over a range of space and time scales. These strategi ...

Caenorhabditis elegans is a well-established model system particularly suited for studying cell–cell fusion because of its highly predictable and rapid development and its known cell lineage. This chapter focuses on understanding the ultrastructural components of cell fusi ...

Myoblast fusion requires a number of cellular behaviors, including cell migration, recognition, and adhesion, as well as a series of subcellular behaviors, such as cytoskeletal rearrangements, vesicle trafficking, and membrane dynamics, leading to two cells becoming one. With the d ...

We have developed an integrated genetic, genomic, and computational approach to identify and characterize genes involved in myoblast fusion in Drosophila. We first used fluorescence-activated cell sorting to purify mesodermal cells both from wild-type embryos and from 12 variant ...

Myoblast fusion in Drosophila has become a powerful genetic system with which to unravel the mechanisms underlying cell fusion. The identification of important components of myoblast fusion by genetic analysis has led to a molecular pathway toward our understanding of this cellular p ...

Mesenchymal cells of the sea urchin embryo provide a valuable experimental model for the analysis of cell–cell fusion in vivo. The unsurpassed optical transparency of the sea urchin embryo facilitates analysis of cell fusion in vivo using fluorescent markers and time-lapse three-dime ...

As representatives of the 60 trillion cells that make a human body, a sperm and an egg meet, recognize each other, and fuse to create a new generation. Thus, gamete fusion is an extremely important process that must transpire without error to launch life activity. This may drive the fusion mechanism to evo ...

Cell fusion would seem to be obviously recognizable upon visual inspection, and many studies employ a simple microscopic fusion index to quantify the rate and extent of fusion in cell culture. However, when cells are not in monolayers or when there is a large background of multinucleation throu ...

Macrophages are mononucleate cells that fuse in rare and specific instances to form osteo-clasts in bone or giant cells in chronic inflammatory conditions. Because of the central role these cells play in bone metabolism and in inflammation, respectively, methods to study their formation ...

A healthy syncytium in the placenta is vital to a successful pregnancy. The trophoblast builds up the natural barrier between the mother and the developing fetus and is the site of gas, nutrition, and waste exchange. An inadequate formation of this tissue leads to several pathologies of pregnanc ...

Voltage-gated K+ channels (KV channels) are encoded by the KCNx gene family and have such a wide range of properties that it is necessary to identify the precise expression profile that is instrumental in governing the electrical phenotype of a cell and its response to extrinsic factors. Real-ti ...

A comprehensive understanding of regulatory protein interactions with their target genes is fundamental to determining transcriptional networks and identifying important events in the regulation of gene expression. Here we describe how transcriptional regulatory reg ...

Macroscopic ion channel currents (I) are a product of the channel open probability (P o), the single channel current (i) and the number of channels present on the cell surface (N) at any given time (I = P o iN). Endocytosis has been shown to be one of the key determinants of cell surface channel density and the defects ...

Potassium channels display considerable functional diversity. Alternative pre-mRNA splicing represents one of the most powerful post-transcriptional mechanisms to create physiological diversity by generating multiple protein products from a single gene. Due to the mod ...

Macroscopic ion channel currents (1) are a product of the channel open probability (Po), the single channel current (i) and the number of channels present on the cell surface (N) at any given time (I = PoiN). Intra-cellular trafficking pathways are proving to be of vital importance in regulating ion cha ...

Macroscopic ion channel currents (I) are a product of the channel open probability (Po), the single channel current (i) and the number of channels present on the cell surface (N) at any given time (I = PoiN). Endocytosis has been shown to be one of the key determinants of cell surface channel density and defec ...

The traditional view of the plasma membrane as a uniform cellular envelope formed from a homogenous mixture of lipids has been refined in recent years to reflect the heterogeneity of its composite lipids. The membrane can consist of upwards of 500 different types of lipids, which exhibit complex ...

Phosphoinositides are an important component of the cell as they have a variety of roles that include cytoskeleton regulation, generation of second messengers, endosome trafficking, membrane transport and regulation of ion channels. The direct interaction between phosphatid ...

TREK potassium channels belong to a family of channel subunits with two-pore domains (K2P). TREK1 knockout mice display impaired polyunsaturated fatty acid-mediated protection against brain ischemia, reduced sensitivity to volatile anesthetics, resistance to depression a ...