Molecular Biology Of The Cell 6th Edition by Bruce Alberts, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, Peter Walter

Exercise 1

Before nuclear pore complexes were well under- stood, it was unclear whether nuclear proteins diffused passively into the nucleus and accumulated there by bind- ing to residents of the nucleus such as chromosomes, or whether they were actively imported and accumulated regardless of their affinity for nuclear components. A classic experiment that addressed this prob- lem used several forms of radioactive nucleoplasmin, which is a large pentameric protein involved in chromatin assembly. In this experiment, either the intact protein or the nucleoplasmin heads, tails, or heads with a single tail were injected into the cytoplasm of a frog oocyte or into the nucleus (Figure Q12-1). All forms of nucleoplasmin, except heads, accumulated in the nucleus when injected into the cytoplasm, and all forms were retained in the nucleus when injected there.