A circular uncoating mechanism

In retrospect it seems obvious. If you need to uncoat a vesicle only after the vesicle has formed, use the spherical shape of the vesicle as a trigger for uncoating. Now, Joëlle Bigay, Bruno Antonny (Institut de Pharmacologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire, Valbonne-Sophia-Antipolis, France), and colleagues have evidence for this mechanism.

Morphology was not the first suspect as a trigger for uncoating Golgi transport vesicles. Lipid metabolism was a possibility, and Antonny and others experimented in vitro with the effect of different lipid mixtures on uncoating. But in vivo evidence for changes in lipid composition during vesicle budding was lacking.

The different in vitro lipid compositions did result in different uncoating dynamics, however. Antonny suspected that some of the in vitro mixtures were mimicking a distorted lipid arrangement seen during membrane curvature. Sure enough, vesicles with...