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LIPID MAPS was founded in 2003 with NIH funding. [14] LIPID MAPS was previously funded by a multi-institutional grant from Wellcome, and is now funded under an MRC Partnership award, held jointly by University of Cardiff led by Prof Valerie O'Donnell, the Babraham Institute, UCSD and Swansea University, and The University of Edinburgh.
A model lipid bilayer is any bilayer assembled in vitro, as opposed to the bilayer of natural cell membranes or covering various sub-cellular structures like the nucleus. They are used to study the fundamental properties of biological membranes in a simplified and well-controlled environment, and increasingly in bottom-up synthetic biology for ...
As discussed in the Structure and organization section, the hydrophobic attraction of lipid tails in water is the primary force holding lipid bilayers together. Thus, the elastic modulus of the bilayer is primarily determined by how much extra area is exposed to water when the lipid molecules are stretched apart. [ 81 ]
Schematic showing two possible conformations of the lipids at the edge of a pore. In the top image the lipids have not rearranged, so the pore wall is hydrophobic. In the bottom image some of the lipid heads have bent over, so the pore wall is hydrophilic. Edge energy is the energy per unit length of a free edge contacting water.
Evert Gorter and François Grendel (Dutch physiologists) approached the discovery of our present model of the plasma membrane structure as a lipid bi-layer. They simply hypothesized that if the plasma membrane is a bi-layer, then the surface area of the mono-layer of lipids measured would be double the surface area of the plasma membrane.
Membrane lipids are a group of compounds (structurally similar to fats and oils) which form the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane. The three major classes of membrane lipids are phospholipids, glycolipids, and cholesterol. Lipids are amphiphilic: they have one end that is soluble in water ('polar') and an ending that is soluble in fat ...
The fatty acid structure is one of the most fundamental categories of biological lipids and is commonly used as a building-block of more structurally complex lipids. The carbon chain, typically between four and 24 carbons long, [ 23 ] may be saturated or unsaturated , and may be attached to functional groups containing oxygen , halogens ...
The chemical structure of cholesterol, which differs greatly from a standard phospholipid. The presence of cholesterol exerts a profound but complicated influence on lipid bilayer properties because of its unique physical characteristics. Although it is a lipid, cholesterol bears little resemblance to a phospholipid.