Piecing Together the Patchwork of Contact Sites

Abstract

Contact sites are places where two organelles join together to carry out a shared activity requiring nonvesicular communication. A large number of contact sites have been discovered, and almost any two organelles can contact each other. General rules about contacts include constraints on bridging proteins, with only a minority of bridges physically creating contacts by acting as 'tethers'. The downstream effects of contacts include changing the physical behaviour of organelles, and also forming biochemically heterogeneous subdomains. However, some functions typically localized to contact sites, such as lipid transfer, have no absolute requirement to be situated there. Therefore, the key aspect of contacts is the directness of communication, which allows metabolic channelling and collective regulation.

Keywords: biological transport; intracellular membranes/metabolism; membrane lipids/metabolism; nonvesicular traffic; vesicular transport.