title: Forty years on: clathrin-coated pits continue to fascinate.
abstract: Clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) is a fundamental process in cell biology and has been extensively investigated over the past several decades. Every cell biologist learns about it at some point during his or her education, and the beauty of this process has led many of us to go deeper and make it the topic of our research. Great progress has been made toward elucidating the mechanisms of CME, and the field is becoming increasingly complex, with several hundred new publications every year. This makes it easy to get lost in the vast amount of literature and forget about the fundamentals of the field, which are based on the careful interpretation of simple observations made >40 years ago, as exemplified by a study performed by Anderson, Brown, and Goldstein in 1977. We examine how this seminal study was pivotal to our understanding of CME and its progression into ever-increasing complexity over the past four decades.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Science, Centre for Membrane Interactions and Dynamics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Hannes
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Maib
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Science, Centre for Membrane Interactions and Dynamics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Elizabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Smythe
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Science, Centre for Membrane Interactions and Dynamics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, United Kingdom k.ayscough@sheffield.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Kathryn
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ayscough
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002966:Clathrin / Q000266:history* / Q000502:physiology; D022163:Clathrin-Coated Vesicles / Q000378:metabolism* / Q000502:physiology*; D003034:Coated Pits, Cell-Membrane / Q000378:metabolism / Q000502:physiology; D004705:Endocytosis / Q000502:physiology; D011992:Endosomes / Q000502:physiology; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans
chemical_list: D002966:Clathrin