Partial Sequence and Turnover of Rat Liver Gap Junction Protein
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
Gap junctions are cell-membrane specializations that provide a direct pathway for the traffic of small molecules between the cytoplasmic compartments of adjacent cells. J. D. Robertson (1963) is credited with first describing gap junctions in his studies of the electrical synapse of the Mauthner cell in the goldfish brain, but other investigators before him had observed them, notably Karrer (1960), who described “quintuple layered interconnections” between the muscle cells investing the carotid. The same structure (named the nexus) was clearly recognized by Dewey and Barr (1964) as a membrane-contact specialization having to do with coupling between smooth-muscle cells. Electrophysiologic and dye-transfer experiments (Potter et al. 1966) and morphological approaches such as freeze cleaving (Kreutziger 1968; Goodenough and Revel 1970; McNutt and Weinstein 1970) and lanthanum staining (Revel and Karnovsky 1967) led to a rapid realization that gap junctions exist not only between excitable cells, but also between nearly all cells...
