Dr. Schekman discovered a set of genes that were required for vesicle traffic.
Announcing the award on Monday at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the Nobel Assembly's citation read that the award was "for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells".
The Nobel committee said their research on "vesicle traffic" — the transport system of our cells — helped scientists understand how "cargo is delivered to the right place at the right time" inside cells.
The trio earned the prize for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic and for solving "the mystery of how the cell organizes its transport system," the Nobel Prize Twitter feed reported.
Second, knock down of TbMyo1 resulted in a lethal defect in vesicle traffic in bloodstream forms.
Significantly, FYVE domain containing proteins are known to be involved in vesicle traffic in other eukaryotes [42], while knock down of the single PI 3-kinase in T. brucei had a deleterious effect on vesicle traffic [44].
A number of insights follow from the finding that TbMyo1 is required for vesicle traffic in trypanosomes.
Second, trypanosomes are extremely slender cells and vesicle traffic is extremely rapid, highly polarized and spatially restricted.
Third, these results have shown the usefulness of trypanosomes for investigating the role of myosin in vesicle traffic.
To confirm that age3Δ cells have defects in intracellular vesicle traffic, we studied their endocytotic efficiency after staining the cytoplasmic membrane with the lipophilic fluorescent dye FM4-64.
Microtubules are implicated in membrane remodeling and polarized vesicle traffic, influencing the barrier and adhesive functions of TJ and AJ [13], [14], [15], [16].
