In eukaryotic cells, intracellular transport largely depends on microtubules and their motors, accompanied by adaptor and regulatory proteins. Reck-Peterson and colleagues previously performed a screen to identify novel regulators of organelle transport in the filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans. Now, they have used this data set to study the regulation of peroxisome dynamics, focusing on a protein they named peroxisome distribution mutant A (PxdA), which they found to specifically affect peroxisome distribution. The authors revealed that PxdA is associated not only with peroxisomes, but also with moving endosomes, and that a large fraction of peroxisomes are not directly transported by microtubule motors but hitchhike on endosomes, using PxdA as a linker. Endosomal hitchhiking has previously been reported in other fungi, and it would be interesting to investigate whether similar mechanisms operate in higher eukaryotes.
References
Salogiannis, J. et al. Peroxisomes move by hitchhiking on early endosomes using the novel linker protein PxdA. J. Cell Biol. 212, 289–296 (2016)
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Strzyz, P. How peroxisomes hitchhike on endosomes. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 17, 134 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm.2016.19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm.2016.19