Figure 8

Spatial and temporal profiles of rising and falling PTEN gradients. Temporal (A) and spatial (B, C) patterns of GFP-PTEN during alternating crescent formation are quantitatively analyzed. A, time course of fluorescence intensities during two half-periods shown in the upper or lower panel, respectively. In each panel, PTEN dynamics is plotted for three positions at different distances from the cell perimeter as indicated by color-coding in the insets. These insets show the fully developed crescents of PTEN in the two half-periods and indicate the positions of line scans used for (B). B, spatial PTEN patterns during generation (upper panel) and decline of a gradient (lower panel). The color-coding refers to time in seconds as indicated in the insets. C, compilation of the shapes of eight fully developed PTEN gradients. Gradients of four half-periods ingressing from the left side are shown in the upper panel, gradients of the four alternating half-periods ingressing from the right side are shown in the lower panel. The curves are aligned by setting the maxima of fluorescence intensities to zero on the space coordinate. These data are based on the recording shown in Additional file 10; times in (A) and numbers in the insets of (B) and (C) indicate seconds after beginning of the movie. These numbers correspond also to the scale of seconds in Figure 7. Images have been acquired at frame-to-frame intervals of 2 seconds. For (B) and (C), data from 5 frames have been averaged.