Characterization of intermediate filaments and their structural organization during epithelium formation in pigmented epithelial cells of the retina in vitro.

Retinal pigmented epithelial cells of chicken have circumferential microfilament bundles (CMBs) at the zonula adherens region. Isolated CMBs are polygons filled with a meshwork composed primarily of intermediate filaments; they show three major components of 200 000, 55 000, and 42 000 daltons in SDS-gel electrophoresis. Here we have characterized the 55 000-dalton protein immunochemically and ultrastructurally. Immunoblotting and immunofluorescence microscopy have shown that the 55 000-dalton protein is an intermediate filament protein, vimentin. Vimentin filaments changed their distribution during differentiation of pigmented epithelial cells in culture. The protein in the elongated cells showed a fibroblast-type pattern of intermediate filaments. During epithelium formation, the filaments were uniformly distributed and formed a finer meshwork at the apical level. In pigmented epithelial cells that differentiated and matured in culture, vimentin and actin exhibited their characteristic behavior after treatment with colcemid. In the central to basal region of the cell, intermediate filaments formed thick perinuclear bundles. In the apical region, however, intermediate filaments changed in organization from a nonpolarized meshwork to a polarized bundle-like structure. Simultaneously, new actin bundles were formed, running parallel to the intermediate filaments. This suggests that there is some interaction between microfilaments and intermediate filaments in the apical region of these cells.