The process of clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) is dependent upon the well-timed arrival of the many components of the clathrin-mediated endocytic machinery to gather cargo and manipulate the plasma membrane into the vesicles1-3. CME is initiated by membrane deforming and cargo-adaptor proteins that come together at nascent sites of endocytosis1. These proteins recruit the coat protein clathrin, which assembles into a cage-like structure that forms the clathrin-coated pit (CCP)4. Once the CCP is fully assembled into a spherical shape, membrane scission, primarily through action of the large GTPase, dynamin, generates free clathrin-coated vesicles (CCVs)5,6. This internalization triggers rapid disassembly of the clathrin coat, allowing components to be re-used for multiple rounds of CME.
The discovery and characterization of the proteins involved in CME has been rooted in traditional biochemical, genetic, and microscopy techniques4-6,8. These assays have elucidated the roles and interaction points of these endocytic components. Although very useful for defining essential components of trafficking machinery, these assays are highly limited in capturing the dynamic behavior of CME components or cargo concentration. This is a critical limitation, since CME is driven by the choreographed assembly of sets of protein modules in defined steps, and since small changes in the dynamics of individual endocytic events can have large cumulative consequences on endocytosis. Further, recent data indicate that individual CCPs might differ both in composition and in behavior, suggesting that the physiological regulation of this process is highly spatially and temporally constrained9-14. Visualizing individual endocytic events, therefore, is essential to understand why there are multiple redundant proteins involved in CME and how these proteins might be controlled by physiological signals to regulate cargo internalization.
Here we describe the use of Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence Microscopy (TIRFM) to observe CME at the level of the dynamics of individual CCPs in living cells. TIRFM relies on the difference in refractive index between the glass coverslip and the fluid environment of cells15,16. When the excitation light is directed towards the cells at more than the critical angle, it is internally reflected, creating an evanescent wave that maintains a thin field of illumination extending approximately 100 nm above the coverslip. This ensures that only the fluorescent molecules within this narrow field are excited. Practically, this allows the excitation of fluorescent molecules on or near the plasma membrane, and minimizes fluorescence from the interior parts of the cell. This provides a significantly higher signal-to-noise ratio and z-axis resolution to visualize events at the plasma membrane, compared to more commonly used modes such as conventional epifluorescence or confocal fluorescence microscopy. We also describe, at an introductory and practical level, the use of a commonly used image analysis platform to analyze and quantitate simple morphological features and dynamics of individual cargo endocytic events.