Cell News—Lipids have specialized sorting processes too

Lipid vesicles with molecules in the vesicle interior. Diagram by MDougM.

Lipid vesicles with molecules in the vesicle interior. Diagram by MDougM.

Proteins and lipids are made in the Golgi apparatus and then are packaged and delivered to specific locations in the cell. Different proteins are known to be sorted into specific packages, but whether lipids are also sorted, or delivered in bulk, was not known. Now Yongqiang Deng and colleagues in ASCB member Christopher Burd’s lab at Yale have developed a fluorescent biosensor of sphingomyelin, a plasma membrane lipid. They observed that the sphingomyelin is packaged into distinct secretory carriers at the Golgi, showing that lipids have specialized transport pathways too. 

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