Receptor-mediated endocytosis: a model and its implications for experimental analysis.

We present a mathematical model for analyzing, simulating, and quantitating the dynamic and steady-state characteristics of receptor-mediated endocytosis. The basic processes considered by the model are ligand-receptor binding, diffusion of receptors and ligand-receptor complexes in the plane of the membrane toward and away from coated pits, binding of ligand-receptor complexes to coated pit proteins, endocytosis of coated pit contents, degradation of ligand, and recycling of undegraded receptors. The model accounts quantitatively for a wide variety of kinetic data and makes new predictions about steady-state characteristics. We show that for homogeneous receptors the slope of the Scatchard plot is not necessarily constant but can have a positive or negative derivative, depending on the concentration of coated pit proteins and their reactivity. This finding suggests that binding data, which show linear and concave curves, might be explainable be a simple coated pit-related mechanism. Similarly the relationship between the x-intercept and the number of receptors is also affected by kinetic parameters controlling endocytosis. We briefly discuss these results in terms of possible mechanisms for the action of tumor promoters, the large variations in receptor number and affinity in the literature, and methods for quantitative characterization of parameters.