Abstract
To study protein function in cellular signaling, manual microinjection is a direct technique, but limited by the small size of many cells. The giant vertebrate cell, the Xenopus laevis oocyte, is a perfect model system to perform these studies. Oocytes are numerous and synchronous cells, arrested in the G2 phase of the cell cycle and easily amenable to biochemical, electrophysiological, and cytological studies. We describe how to microinject proteins or peptides in this model and we study, as an example, the Grb2 transduction cascade.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. R. Pierce (Pasteur Institute, Lille) for reading the manuscript. This study was supported by two successive grants from the “Ligue Contre le Cancer, Comité de l'Aisne” and the “Ligue Contre le Cancer, Comité du Nord” to KC and EBP.
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Cailliau, K., Browaeys-Poly, E. (2009). A Microinjectable Biological System, the Xenopus Oocyte, as an Approach to Understanding Signal Transduction Protein Function. In: Carroll, D. (eds) Microinjection. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 518. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-202-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-202-1_4
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