At reduced temperature, endocytic membrane traffic is blocked in multivesicular carrier endosomes in rat cardiac myocytes.

Temperatures around 20 degrees C are known to block degradation of endocytosed material by preventing its transport to lysosomes, accordingly reduced temperature has been widely used to define endosomes. Newer studies have revealed that the low temperature block is proximal to perinuclear late endosomes, but it is not clear whether the block is already in early endosomes, or whether the traffic proceeds to multivesicular carrier endosomes which mediate transport from early to late compartments. We have now focused on this problem using rat cardiac myocytes. First, cell fractionation on Percoll gradients showed that at reduced temperatures (22 degrees C and 26 degrees C), with prolonged chas…