Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2013 Jun 10;201(6):903–913. doi: 10.1083/jcb.201301091

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

This article is distributed under the terms of an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike–No Mirror Sites license for the first six months after the publication date (see http://www.rupress.org/terms). After six months it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

PMC Copyright notice

Figure 4. — UNC-40 and UNC-6 promote invasive protrusion formation and basement membrane clearance. (A) A single basement membrane gap (basement membrane viewed with laminin::GFP) is formed in wild-type animals (left, outlined by dotted line), whereas in unc-40 and unc-6 mutants multiple basement membrane breaches occur (middle and right). (B) Quantification of basement membrane breaching (each block represents one animal) reveals that when multiple basement membrane breaching events occur in wild-type animals, they quickly resolve into a single gap (top). In contrast, when multiple breaches occur in unc-40 and unc-6 mutants they often fail to resolve into a single basement membrane hole (middle and bottom). (C) Examination of ACs expressing the cell membrane marker cdh-3 > GFP::CAAX (top, green; middle, grayscale) reveals the presence of an invasive protrusion (bracket) that extends across the basement membrane (top left, magenta) through a single basement membrane gap in a wild-type animal (bottom left, ventral view, grayscale). In unc-40 (middle) and unc-6 (right) mutants no invasive protrusion is extended (asterisks with brackets) through the multiple basement membrane gaps (bottom). (D) Quantification of the volume of the invasive protrusion formed within an hour of initial basement membrane breach in wild-type, unc-6, and unc-40 mutant animals (n ≥ 28 animals examined for each genotype). The asterisks denote statistically significant differences (P < 0.0001, Wilcoxon rank-sum test). (E) A ventral view time series of the basement membrane (visualized with laminin::GFP) in a wild-type animal (top) captures the faster rate of basement membrane opening compared with an unc-40 mutant (bottom; see Video 6). (F) The graphs show quantification of basement membrane removal over time for the animals shown in E (left) and the mean rates of hole expansion for wild-type and unc-40(e271) animals (right). Asterisk denotes a statistically significant difference (P = 0.01, Student’s t test; n = 6 animals per genotype). Error bar represents SEM. Bars, 5 µm.