In vivo characterization of Drosophila golgins reveals redundancy and plasticity of vesicle capture at the Golgi apparatus

The Golgi is the central sorting station in the secretory pathway and thus the destination of transport vesicles arriving from the endoplasmic reticulum and endosomes and from within the Golgi itself. Cell viability, therefore, requires that the Golgi accurately receives multiple classes of vesicle. One set of proteins proposed to direct vesicle arrival at the Golgi are the golgins, long coiled-coil proteins localized to specific parts of the Golgi stack. In mammalian cells, three of the golgins, TMF, golgin-84, and GMAP-210, can capture intra-Golgi transport vesicles when placed in an ectopic location. However, the individual golgins are not required for cell viability, and mouse knockout mutants only have defects in specific tissues. To further illuminate this system, we examine the Drosophila orthologs of these three intra-Golgi golgins. We show that ectopic forms can capture intra-Golgi transport vesicles, but strikingly, the cargo present in the vesicles captured by each golgin varies between tissues. Loss-of-function mutants show that the golgins are individually dispensable, although the loss of TMF recapitulates the male fertility defects observed in mice. However, the deletion of multiple golgins results in defects in glycosylation and loss of viability. Examining the vesicles captured by a particular golgin when another golgin is missing reveals that the vesicle content in one tissue changes to resemble that of a different tissue. This reveals a plasticity in Golgi organization between tissues, providing an explanation for why the Golgi is sufficiently robust to tolerate the loss of many of the individual components of its membrane traffic machinery.