Journal of Biological Chemistry
Volume 281, Issue 40, 6 October 2006, Pages 30279-30288
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Lipids and Lipoproteins
Efficient Trafficking of Ceramide from the Endoplasmic Reticulum to the Golgi Apparatus Requires a VAMP-associated Protein-interacting FFAT Motif of CERT*

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Ceramide is synthesized at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and transported to the Golgi apparatus by CERT for its conversion to sphingomyelin in mammalian cells. CERT has a pleck-strin homology (PH) domain for Golgi targeting and a START domain catalyzing the intermembrane transfer of ceramide. The region between the two domains contains a short peptide motif designated FFAT, which is supposed to interact with the ER-resident proteins VAP-A and VAP-B. Both VAPs were actually co-immunoprecipitated with CERT, and the CERT/VAP interaction was abolished by mutations in the FFAT motif. These mutations did not affect the Golgi targeting activity of CERT. Whereas mutations of neither the FFAT motif nor the PH domain inhibited the ceramide transfer activity of CERT in a cell-free system, they impaired the ER-to-Golgi transport of ceramide in intact and in semi-intact cells at near endogenous expression levels. By contrast, when overexpressed, both the FFAT motif and the PH domain mutants of CERT substantially supported the transport of ceramide from the ER to the site where sphingomyelin is produced. These results suggest that the Golgi-targeting PH domain and ER-interacting FFAT motif of CERT spatially restrict the random ceramide transfer activity of the START domain in cells.

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*

This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan, by the Japan Health Sciences Foundation, by CREST, and by Toray Science Foundation. The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked “advertisement”in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

The on-line version of this article (available at http://www.jbc.org) contains supplementary data and supplemental Figs. S1-S3.