Measurement of intracellular sterol transport in yeast

Abstract

Intracellular sterol transport occurs largely by non-vesicular mechanisms in which sterol transport proteins extract sterol from one membrane and transfer it to another across the cytoplasm. Here we describe a suite of complementary assays to measure intracellular sterol transport in the model eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as well as to quantify protein-mediated sterol transport between populations of vesicles in vitro. The in vivo assays can be adapted to study sterol transport in other cell types.