In this study, we have documented an essential role for ADP-ribosylation factor 6 (ARF6) in cell surface remodeling in response to physiological stimulus and in the down regulation of stress fiber formation. We demonstrate that the G-protein-coupled receptor agonist bombesin triggers the redistribution of ARF6-and Rac1-containing endosomal vesicles to the cell surface. This membrane redistribution was accompanied by cortical actin rearrangements and was inhibited by dominant negative ARF6, implying that bombesin is a physiological trigger of ARF6 activation. Furthermore, these studies provide a new model for bombesininduced Rac1 activation that involves ARF6-regulated endosomal recycling. The bombesin-elicited translocation of vesicular ARF6 was mimicked by activated G␣q and was partially inhibited by expression of RGS2, which down regulates Gq function. This suggests that Gq functions as an upstream regulator of ARF6 activation. The ARF6-induced peripheral cytoskeletal rearrangements were accompanied by a depletion of stress fibers. Moreover, cells expressing activated ARF6 resisted the formation of stress fibers induced by lysophosphatidic acid. We show that the ARF6-dependent inhibition of stress fiber formation was due to an inhibition of RhoA activation and was overcome by expression of a constitutively active RhoA mutant. The latter observations demonstrate that activation of ARF6 down regulates Rho signaling. Our findings underscore the potential roles of ARF6, Rac1, and RhoA in the coordinated regulation of cytoskeletal remodeling.The ADP-ribosylation factor (ARF) proteins comprise a group of five Ras-related GTPases that are thought to function as regulators of membrane traffic. In vitro, the ARF proteins function as cofactors in the cholera toxin-catalyzed ADP-ribosylation of Gs (21, 36), hence its name, and have also been shown to stimulate the activity of phospholipase D (4,6,16,25,31). ARF1 has been extensively investigated; it is localized to the Golgi apparatus and plays a critical role in the recruitment of coat proteins during the formation of transport vesicles, a process critical for maintaining the integrity of the secretory pathway (37). Recently, much attention has been focused on ARF6, the least-conserved ARF protein that shares 66% amino acid homology with ARF1. ARF6 is localized to the plasma membrane and endosomes depending on its nucleotide status and has been shown to regulate endocytic traffic at the cell periphery (8,42,45).Immunoelectron microscopy observations in CHO cells have revealed that expression of the GTP-bound constitutively activated mutant of ARF6, ARF6(Q67L), induced an elaboration of the plasma membrane and a depletion of recycling endosomal vesicles. In contrast, the expression of the dominant negative mutant of ARF6, ARF6(T27N), resulted in sequestration of ARF6 in the perinuclear recycling endosome, the distribution of which partially overlapped with that of transferrin receptors and cellubrevin (10). These findings, together with the observation that ARF6(T27N) ex...