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Endocytosis and endosomal trafficking to vacuoles play important roles in regulating the homeostasis of plasma membrane (PM) proteins in plant cells. FREE1 (FYVE domain protein required for endosomal sorting 1) is a plant-unique component of the ESCRT (endosomal sorting complex required for transport) machinery. In free1 mutant plants, PIN-FORMED 2 (PIN2)-GFP was found to mislocalize from the PM to the tonoplast. In this chapter, we describe a detailed protocol for studying vacuolar sorting and degradation of PIN2-GFP by using T-DNA insertional mutants, dexamethasone (DEX) inducible RNAi lines, and other tools, including Fei-Mao (FM) dye staining and dark treatment. By using these methods, we illustrate the endosomal trafficking and vacuolar degradation of PIN2-GFP in plants.

As a fundamental metabolic pathway to degrade and recycle cellular cargos, autophagy is highly induced upon stress, starvation and senescence conditions in plants. A double-membrane structure named autophagosome will form during this process for cargo sequestration and delivery into the vacuole. A number of regulators have been characterized in plants, including the autophagy-related (ATG) proteins and other plant-specific proteins. Among them, ATG8 will undergo a lipidation process to become a membrane-bound ATG8-phosphatidylethanolamine form and mark the growing autophagosomal membrane as well as the completed autophagosome. Therefore, ATG8 has been regarded as a marker for autophagosomes; and biochemical detection of the membrane-associated form of ATG8 is used as one of the principal methods for measurement of autophagic activity. Here, we describe an ATG8 lipidation assay for detection of the ATG8-PE form using Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings.