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ER exit sites in Drosophila display abundant ER-Golgi vesicles and pearled tubes but no megacarriers

Ke Yang (1), Min Liu (1), Zhi Feng (1), Marta Rojas (2), Lingjian Zhou (1), Hongmei Ke (1), José Carlos Pastor-Pareja (1,3)

bioRxiv, 2021. DOI: 10.1101/2021.03.09.434528

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Keywords

Traffic; Secretion; Intermediate compartment; ERGIC; Golgi; Tango1

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Abstract

Secretory cargos are collected at ER exit sites (ERES) before transport to the Golgi apparatus. Decades of research have provided many details of the molecular events underlying ER-Golgi exchanges. Essential questions, however, remain about the organization of the ER-Golgi interface in cells and the type of membrane structures mediating traffic from ERES. To investigate these, we used transgenic tagging in Drosophila flies, 3D-SIM and FIB-SEM to characterize ERES-Golgi units in collagen-producing fat body, imaginal discs and imaginal discs overexpressing ERES determinant Tango1. We found in front of ERES a pre-cis-Golgi region involved in both anterograde and retrograde transport. This pre-cis-Golgi is continuous with the rest of the Golgi, not a separate intermediate compartment or collection of large carriers, for which we found no evidence. We found, however, many vesicles, as well as pearled tubules connecting ERES and Golgi.

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How Our Software Was Used

Dragonfly was used to construct 3D models of 15 fat body and 15 wing disc ERES-Golgi units. Plus, its Movie Maker tools were used to create movies of rotating ERES-Golgi units.

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Author Affiliation

(1) School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
(2) School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
(3) Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences, Beijing, China

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