Isolation of plasma membranes from Xenopus embryos

Summary Plasma membranes were isolated in high yield from Xenopus gastrulae by repeated sedimentation in discontinuous sucrose gradients. Most of the yolk was separated by lowspeed sedimentation before centrifugation on the discontinuous sucrose gradients. The isolation of plasma membranes was followed by covalent labelling of the surface of dissociated gastrula cells with diazoniobenzene sulphonate, by electron microscopy and the distribution of enzymatic markers. The isolated plasma membranes have a low neural inducing activity as compared to other cell constituents.