Monitoring and Modulating Intracellular Cholesterol Trafficking Using ALOD4, a Cholesterol-Binding Protein.

Mammalian cells carefully control their cholesterol levels by employing multiple feedback mechanisms to regulate synthesis of cholesterol and uptake of cholesterol from circulating lipoproteins. Most of a cell's cholesterol (~80% of total) is in the plasma membrane (PM), but the protein machinery that regulates cellular cholesterol resides in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane, which contains a very small fraction (~1% of total) of a cell's cholesterol. How does the ER communicate with PM to monitor cholesterol levels in that membrane? Here, we describe a tool, ALOD4, that helps us answer this question. ALOD4 traps cholesterol at the PM, leading to depletion of ER cholesterol without altering total cell cholesterol. The effects of ALOD4 are reversible. This tool has been used to show that the ER is able to continuously sample cholesterol from PM, providing ER with information about levels of PM cholesterol.