Fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) has been a powerful tool for characterizing the mobility of cell surface membrane proteins. However, the application of FRAP to the study of intracellular membrane proteins has been hampered by the lack of specific probes and their physical inaccessibility in the cytoplasm. We have measured the mobility of a model transmembrane protein, the temperature-sensitive vesicular stomatitis viral membrane glycoprotein (ts-O45-G), in transit from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to the Golgi complex. ts-O45-G accumulates in the ER at nonpermissive temperature (39.5 degrees C) and is transported via the Golgi complex to the surface upon shifting cells to the permissive temperature (31 degrees C). Rhodamine-labeled Fab fragments against a cytoplasmic epitope of ts-O45-G (rh-P5D4-Fabs) were microinjected into cells to visualize the intracellular viral membrane protein and to determine its mobility by FRAP with a confocal microscope. Moreover, we have measured the effects of microinjected antibodies against beta-COP on the mobility of ts-O45-G following release of the temperature block. FRAP was essentially complete when rh-P5D4-Fab-injected cells were bleached either following release of labeled ts-O45-G from the ER or upon its accumulation at 20 degrees C in the trans-Golgi network (TGN). In contrast, recovery was reduced by about one third when infected cells had been injected with antibodies that bind to beta-COP in vivo. The diffusion constant of mobile ts-O45-G under all conditions was approximately 10 x 10(-10) cm2/s. These results validate the feasibility of FRAP for the study of an intracellular transmembrane protein and provide the first evidence that such a protein is highly mobile.