Neurotransmitters are released from nerve terminals and neuroendocrine cells by calcium-dependent exocytosis of vesicles. Before fusion, vesicles are docked to the plasma membrane and rendered release competent through a process called priming. Electrophysiological methods such as membrane capacitance measurements and carbon fiber amperometry accurately measure the fusion step of exocytosis wit...

The spontaneous reconstitution of lipid-protein complexes was examined by mixing bacteriorhodopsin or UDP-glucuronosyltransferase with preformed, unilamellar bilayers of pure dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine. Spontaneous insertion of these proteins into vesicles of dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine was facilitated by resonicating the vesicles at 4 degrees C. The property of resonicated vesicles that...

Front Cover: This special issue is dedicated to commemorate Wolfgang P. Meier, who had significant contributions in the fields of amphiphilic copolymer syntheses and their hierarchical self-assembly, block vesicles (so-called polymersomes), hybrid membranes. The self-assembly molecules generating nano- or micro-assemblies (membranes, micelles, vesicles, nanoparticles) that can be combined with ...

The recycling of synaptic vesicles in nerve terminals is thought to involve clathrin-coated vesicles. However, the properties of nerve terminal coated vesicles have not been characterized. Starting from a preparation of purified nerve terminals obtained from rat brain, we isolated clathrin-coated vesicles by a series of differential and density gradient centrifugation steps. The enrichment of c...

As Satsuma mandarin is a multi-layered fruit, the optical properties of different tissue layers influence performance spectroscopy-based quality detection models. Therefore, variation in bulk (BOP) inner (juice vesicles) and outer (flavedo) layer was investigated for harvest times, fruit sizes cultivars. from three cultivars (Iwasaki, Okitsu Goku Wase) were harvested at times around recommended...

Both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells release small, phospholipid-enclosed vesicles into their environment. Why do cells release vesicles? Initial studies showed that eukaryotic vesicles are used to remove obsolete cellular molecules. Although this release of vesicles is beneficial to the cell, the vesicles can also be a danger to their environment, for instance in blood, where vesicles can pro...

Spontaneous synaptic vesicle fusion is a common property of all synapses. To trace the origin of spontaneously fused vesicles in hippocampal synapses, we tagged vesicles with fluorescent styryl dyes, antibodies against synaptotagmin-1, or horseradish peroxidase. We could show that synaptic vesicles recycle at rest, and after spontaneous exo-endocytosis, they populate a reluctantly releasable po...

An identical cytochrome b561 was found to be an integral component of both chromaffin vesicles from adrenal medulla and neurosecretory vesicles from posterior pituitary by spectrophotometric and immunological techniques. The neurosecretory vesicles had 6.8 micrograms of cytochrome/mg of membrane protein versus 69 micrograms/mg in chromaffin vesicles. This cytochrome was also immunologically det...

Ultramicroscopic membrane vesicles were found in the plasma of 17 patients with certain types of leukemia (acute promyelocytic leukemia, acute monocytic leukemia, acute myelomonocytic leu kemia, and chronic myelogenous leukemia) and in guinea pigs with the L2C leukemia. Labeled vesicles were cleared from normal guinea pig plasma according to a two exponential function with a half-life for the s...

Lysozyme is a globular protein which is known to bind to negatively charged phospholipid vesicles. In order to study the relationship between binding of the protein and the subsequent destabilization of the phospholipid vesicles a set of experiments was performed using phospholipid monolayers and vesicles. Using microelectrophoresis the binding of lysozyme to phospholipid vesicles made of PS wa...