Update on Methods and Techniques to Study Endocytosis in Plants

The growing interest in the investigation of endocytosis, vesicular transport routes, and corresponding regulatory mechanisms resulted in the exploitation of cell biological, genetic, biochemical, and proteomic approaches. Methods and techniques such as site-directed and T-DNA insertional mutagenesis, RNAi, classical inhibitor treatments, and recombinant GFP technology combined with confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) and electron and immune-electron microscopy were routinely employed for investigation of endocytosis in plant cells. However, new approaches such as high-throughput confocal microscopy screens on mutants and proteomic analyses on isolated vesicular compartments and root cells treated with vesicular trafficking inhibitors (both focused on the identification of new endosomal proteins), together with chemical genomics and advanced microscopy approaches such as Forster resonance energy transfer (FRET), fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP), light sheet-based fluorescence microscopy, and super-resolution microscopy provided a significant amount of new data and these new methods appear as extremely promising tools in this field.