Invertebrate gap junctions.

Both glycerol and glutaraldehyde, the two most commonly used chemical aids in freeze-fractue studies, have been shown individually to affect the structure of certain membranes as observed in freeze-fracture replicas. The present investigation studied the effect of glycerol on the gap junctions found in a number of tissues from several invertebrate phyla. Glycerol was shown, in some of these tissues, to affect both the spatial arrangement of the particles within the membrane and their fracturing properties if the tissue had not been prefixed with glutaraldehyde. It is suggested that the effect of glycerol on invertebrate gap junctions may be of diagnostic use in enabling them to be separated into a number, or spectrum, of types. Previously B-type gap junctions have been reported only in Arthropoda. This study has extended knowledge of their occurrence into the phyla Coelenterata, Platyhelminthes and Annelida. The B-type gap junctions appear consistently to have a 12-nm particle separation, which is larger than the 10-nm separation found in vertebrate and molluscan A-type gap junctions.