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. 2016 Jun 23;11(6):e0158032. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0158032

Fig 1. Transfection of N2a cells with just α4 or β2 fails to produce significant surface expression.

Fig 1

Transfection of just α4 or β2 cDNA without the complementary subunit failed to produce significant α4 or β2 protein expression in the plasma membrane (PM). The α4 and β2 subunits were tagged with superecliptic pHluorin (SEP) and imaged with total internal reflection fluorescent (TIRF) microscopy. a. TIRF images of N2a cells expressing SEP-tagged α4 (α4-SEP) (top row) and β2 subunits (β2-SEP) (bottom row) at an extracellular pH of 7.4 (left column) and 5.5 (right column). The absence of a significant effect of extracellular pH on cellular fluorescence shows that SEP-tagged protein expression on the PM was negligible. Scale bars are 10 μm. b. The bars are the internal (INT), total (TOT), and PM fluorescent intensity measured in arbitrary units (A.U.) for N2a cells transfected with α4-SEP or β2-SEP cDNA. Internal and total fluorescence was not significantly different (N.S.) for the α4-SEP, or β2-SEP, subunit.