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Updated: May 27, 2025

Ligand Nano-cluster Arrays in a Supported Lipid Bilayer
Published on: April 23, 2017
A macroscopically homogeneous lipid phase exhibits leaflet-specific lipid diffusion in a glass-supported lipid
Takuhiro Otosu1, Miyuki Sakaguchi1, Shoichi Yamaguchi1
1Department of Applied Chemistry, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Saitama University, 255 Shimo-Okubo, Sakura, Saitama 338-8570, Japan. otosu@apc.saitama-u.ac.jp.
Abstract:
Lipid bilayer is a building block of cellular membranes. Understanding the physicochemical properties of a lipid bilayer and their composition dependence is thus inevitable to infer the biological functions of lipids in cellular membranes. Here, we performed leaflet-specific lipid diffusion analysis to study the structural and dynamical properties of lipids on glass-supported lipid bilayers composed of dioleoyl phosphatidylcholine, dipalmitoyl phosphatidylcholine and cholesterol, especially focusing on the regions where a macroscopically homogeneous phase was observed in the ternary phase diagram. The data showed that the interleaflet coupling and the effect of the solid support were highly dependent on the lipid/cholesterol compositions. We also found a distinctive feature of leaflet-specific lipid diffusion in the region near the critical point. This observation was discussed in terms of the nanoscale heterogeneity.
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