This movie shows the moving trajectory of a trans-membrane protein, acetylcholine receptor (AChR), on the membrane of a live Xenopus muscle cell after dissected for two days. The AChR is labeled by a fluorescent quantum dot. The movie was obtained using an inverted Leica microscope equipped with an Andor Ixon3 897 EMCCD camera. The movie is played in real time and the scale bar is 2 �gm. To clearly reveal the details of the AChR trajectory, the image is digitally magnified by ~3 times.

Click the picture to see the real-time motion of the AChR on the live cell membrane. In a time period of 188s, one sees the AChR being transiently confined three times at different locations for a period of ~20s, ~10s and ~80s, respectively. Such confinement effect makes the AChRs to behave differently from the normal Brownian diffusion.