Abstract

Spiral grooves of the plasma membrane of Pityrosporum were observed by freeze-fracturing. They were determined to have left-handed by the following two methods. First, determination of the handedness was done by keeping the replicas floating right side up during cleaning procedures. This method had two drawbacks: maintaining the replicas floating right side up during cleaning procedures was tedious; and some or parts of the replicas might be reversed unintentionally. We worked out a new method in which the side of the replica was determined by tilting the replica under the electron microscope. This tilting method proved most useful in attempting to describe the mirror-image asymmetry, particularly when biological membranes were prepared by using the freeze-fracture techniques.

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