It is well established that suction feeding fish use a variable amount of swimming (ram) during prey capture. However, the fluid mechanical effects of ram on suction feeding are not well established. In this study we quantified the effects of ram on the maximum fluid speed of the water entering the mouth during feeding as well as the spatial patterns of flow entering the mouth of suction-feedin...

Exosomes are extracellular vesicles of 50 to 100 nm in diameter, released by many cell types. Exosomes are formed inside the cell in intracellular endosomal compartments and are secreted upon fusion of these compartments with the plasma membrane. Cells also secrete other types of membrane vesicles, for instance, by outward budding from the plasma membrane, and although some of them clearly diff...

Myosin VIIa functions in the outer retina, and loss of this function causes human blindness in Usher syndrome type 1B (USH1B). In mice with mutant Myo7a, melanosomes in the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) are distributed abnormally. In this investigation we detected many proteins in RPE cells that could potentially participate in melanosome transport, but of those tested, only myosin VIIa an...

Our previous studies indicated that hepatitis E virus (HEV) forms membrane-associated particles in the cytoplasm, most likely by budding into intracellular vesicles, and requires the multivesicular body (MVB) pathway to release virus particles, and the released HEV particles with a lipid membrane retain the trans-Golgi network protein 2 on their surface. To examine whether HEV utilizes the exos...

The well-known coat-color mutant mouse dilute exhibits a defect in melanosome transport, and although various mutations in the myosin-Va gene, which encodes an actin-based motor protein, have been identified in dilute mice, why missense mutations in the globular tail of myosin-Va, a putative cargo-binding site, cause the dilute phenotype (i.e. lighter coat color) has never been elucidated. In t...