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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2012 Jul 1.
Published in final edited form as: Trends Cell Biol. 2011 May 6;21(7):383–386. doi: 10.1016/j.tcb.2011.03.006

Figure 1. Transport of proteins to the primary cilia.

Figure 1

Ciliary membrane proteins such as GPCRs are delivered from TGN or recycling endosomes to plasma membrane near the base of the primary cilia via tubulo-vesicular carriers (shown as vesicles for simplicity). The exocyst subunits (shown in green) are distributed on the tubulo-vesicular carriers and the plasma membrane. The assembly of the exocyst tethers vesicles to the plasma membrane for fusion, which leads to the incorporation of transmembrane proteins such as GPCRs to the plasma membrane. The Rab proteins (shown in red) on the vesicles regulate assembly of the exocyst complex. Once the cargos are incorporated to the plasma membrane, the BBSome further transports the cargos into the cilia. For simplicity, the intraflagellar transport (IFT) particles are not shown here.