Golgi and Mitochondria Dynamics in Fibroblast Cells

The modifications to molecules that take place in the Golgi apparatus occur in an orderly fashion. Each Golgi stack has two distinct ends, or faces. The cis face of a Golgi stack is the end of the organelle where substances enter from the endoplasmic reticulum for processing, while the trans face is where they exit in the form of smaller detached vesicles. Consequently, the cis face is found near the endoplasmic reticulum, from whence most of the material it receives comes, and the trans face is positioned near the plasma membrane of the cell, to where many of the substances it modifies are shipped. In the digital videos presented above, normal Gray fox lung fibroblast cells (FoLu) were transiently transfected with a mixture of enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) fused to a Golgi targeting signal and DsRed2 fluorescent protein fused to a mitochondrial targeting signal in order to visualize the dynamic interaction between these two organelles.