Making sure late endosomes are on time

Making sure late endosomes are on time

Early endosomes collect and sort cargoes before maturing into late endosomes that ferry those cargoes to the lysosome. Liu et al. identify two proteins that spur early endosomes to transform and thus help ensure that cellular deliveries occur on schedule (1). As an early endosome morphs into a late endosome, it revamps its molecular composition. Early endosomes carry the GTPase Rab5, which attr...

On Time – For Sure

When a computer takes forever to load a website, it may be annoying, but it is nothing more serious than that. If, however, the electronics in a car or a plane don’t process commands exactly when they are supposed to, the consequences can be fatal. Björn Brandenburg and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken study how to construct real-time s...

Late endosomes uproot focal adhesions

Keeping DNA replication below PAR T he polarity proteins PAR-4 and PAR-1 delay cell division in early C. elegans embryos by inhibiting DNA repli-cation, Benkemoun et al. reveal. Cells must divide at the right time during development. This is true from the get-go in C. elegans embryos where, at the two-cell stage, the anterior blastomere divides while its smaller, posterior sister is still in S ...

Delivery of ligands from sorting endosomes to late endosomes occurs by maturation of sorting endosomes

After endocytosis, lysosomally targeted ligands pass through a series of endosomal compartments. The endocytic apparatus that accomplishes this passage may be considered to take one of two forms: (a) a system in which lysosomally targeted ligands pass through preexisting, long-lived early sorting endosomes and are then selectively transported to long-lived late endosomes in carrier vesicles, or...

Not a Sure Thing: Making Regulatory Choices