Scattering measurements on lipid membrane structures

Membranes isolate, maintain, and regulate the biochemical environment within cells and organelles for essential biological processes to take place. While resolving the structures of proteins that inhabit the membranes remains a focus of current structural biology research, studying the structure of the membrane itself can help elucidate how functional components organize within the membrane and how the interplay between the lipid components and membrane proteins facilitates biological functions. X-ray and neutron scattering provides a means for characterizing the basic structural parameters of membrane structures, from which the energetics of biological processes can be inferred, and the different physical states and species of the lipid can be distinguished. This chapter describes different membrane structures suitable for scattering measurements. We will discuss the practical considerations for carrying out these measurements and outline the methods for data interpretation.