Studying the role of lipid rafts on protein receptor bindings with cellular automata

It is widely accepted that lipid rafts promote receptor clustering and thereby facilitate signaling transduction. The role of lipid rafts in inducing and promoting receptor accumulation within the cell membrane has been explored by several computational and experimental studies. However, it remains unclear whether lipid rafts influence the recruitment and binding of proteins from the cytosol as well. To provide an answer to this question a spatial membrane model has been developed based on cellular automata. Our results indicate that lipid rafts indeed influence protein receptor bindings. In particular processes with slow dissociation and binding kinetics are promoted by lipid rafts, whereas fast binding processes are slightly hampered. However, the impact depends on a variety of parameters, such as the size and mobility of the lipid rafts, the induced slow down of receptors within rafts, and also the dissociation and binding kinetics of the cytosolic proteins. Thus, for any individual signaling pathway the influence of lipid rafts on protein binding might be different. To facilitate analyzing this influence given a specific pathway, our approach has been generalized into LiRaM, a modeling and simulation tool for lipid rafts models.