Mechanisms underlying the internalization step of endocytosis: insights from yeast and animal cells

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Endocytosis is only one branch of multiple intracellular trafficking pathways. The unicellular eukaryote S. cerevisiae has been widely used as a model organism for studies of the secretory pathway, a classical example of a process conserved from yeast to humans. The mechanisms underlying trafficking from the Golgi apparatus to the lysosome/vacuole also appeared to have been strongly conserved throughout evolution, and yeast mutants have served as key tools in identification of the genes involved in this pathway. Endocytosis may be divided in early events, essentially the internalization step, and late steps- delivery to endosomes- followed by either the recycling of internalized cargoes, or their targeting to the lysosome/vacuole for degradation. The late steps of endocytosis were rapidly shown to be conserved from yeast to humans. Interestingly, several years of research initially suggested different requirements for the internalization step of endocytosis in yeast and animal cells, but it now seems that the two processes share many similar requirements (reviewed in [27, 28]).