Greasing the wheels of secretory transport

Abstract

Ever since George Palade's pioneering studies of zymogen secretion from pancreatic acinar cells, the underlying molecular mechanisms of vesicle-mediated protein transport have captivated cell biologists and biochemists. A watershed meeting on “Phosphoinositides and the Golgi”, held at the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland (March 13–14, 2001), provided reinterpretation and striking new insights about the functions of this phospholipid class in intracellular protein trafficking.