The multifaceted role of biological membranes prompted early the development of artificial lipid-based models with a primary view of reconstituting the natural functions in vitro so as to study and exploit chemoreception for sensor engineering. Over...
Membrane proteins play an important role in key cellular functions, such as signal transduction, apoptosis, and metabolism. Therefore, structural and functional studies of these proteins are essential in fields such as fundamental biology, medical sc...
Ceramide is the simplest precursor of sphingolipids and is involved in a variety of biological functions ranging from apoptosis to the immune responses. Although ceramide is a minor constituent of plasma membranes, it drastically increases upon cellu...
Lipid asymmetry, the difference in the lipid composition in the inner and outer lipid monolayers (leaflets) of a membrane, is an important feature of eukaryotic plasma membranes. Investigation of the biophysical consequences of lipid asymmetry has be...
Giant lipid vesicles or liposomes are primarily composed of phospholipids and form a lipid bilayer structurally similar to that of the cell membrane. These vesicles, like living cells, are 5–100 μm in diameter and can be easily observed usin...
Membrane proteins are important drug targets which play a pivotal role in various cellular activities. However, unlike cytosolic proteins, most of them are difficult-to-express proteins. In this study, to synthesize and produce sufficient quantities...
We determined the properties of fusion between large unilamellar vesicles (LUVs) and the lipid monolayer by measuring the fluorescence intensity of rhodamine-conjugated phospholipids in cell-sized lipid vesicles. The charge of LUVs (containing cation...
Recently, artificial exosomes have been developed to overcome the challenges of natural exosomes, such as production scalability and stability. In the production of artificial exosomes, the incorporation of membrane proteins into lipid nanostructures...
A miniaturized taste sensor chip was designed for use in a portable-type taste sensing system. The fabricated sensor chip (40 mm × 26 mm × 2.2 mm) has multiple taste-sensing sites consisting of a poly(hydroxyethyl methacrylate) hydrogel with KCl as t...
Artificial membranes are models for biological systems and are important for applications. We introduce a dry two-step self-assembly method consisting of the high-vacuum evaporation of phospholipid molecules over silicon, followed by a subsequent ann...
Background/Objectives: Consciousness remains poorly understood as a causative force. Existing theories describe neural correlates or information processing but do not explain how a unified inner experiential space is physically generated or acts back...
Proteinaceous moieties are critical elements in most detection systems, including biosensing platforms. Their potential is undoubtedly vast, yet many issues regarding their full exploitation remain unsolved. On the other hand, the biosensor formats w...
In vitro non-cellular permeability models such as the parallel artificial membrane permeability assay (PAMPA) are widely applied tools for early-phase drug candidate screening. In addition to the commonly used porcine brain polar lipid extract for mo...
New technologies for manipulating biomembranes have vast potential to aid the understanding of biological phenomena, and as tools to sculpt novel artificial cell architectures for synthetic biology. The manipulation and fusion of vesicles using optic...
Caveolin-1 (CAV1), a membrane protein that is necessary for the formation and maintenance of caveolae, is a promising drug target for the therapy of various diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and liver fibrosis. The biology and pathology of caveolae...
Cleavage of hemagglutinin precursor (HA0) by cellular proteases results in the formation of two subunits, HA1 and HA2. The N-terminal fragment of HA2, named a fusion peptide (HAfp), possess a charged, amine N-terminus. It has been shown that the N-te...
Signal transduction and homeostasis are regulated by complex protein interactions in the intracellular environment. Therefore, the transportation of impermeable macromolecules (nucleic acids, proteins, and drugs) that control protein interactions is...
The amyloid-beta 1-42 (Aβ1-42) oligomers are the most cytotoxic species of the amyloid family and play a key role in the pathology of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). They have been shown to damage cellular membranes, but the exact mechanism is c...
Clostridium perfringens epsilon toxin (Etx) is a pore forming toxin that causes enterotoxaemia in ruminants and may be a cause of multiple sclerosis in humans. To date, most in vitro studies of Etx have used the Madin-Darby canine kidney (MDCK) cell...
Lipid membranes regulate the flow of nutrients and communication signaling between cells and protect the sub-cellular structures. Recent attempts to fabricate artificial systems using nanostructures that mimic the physiological properties of natural...
Membrane proteins reside in the lipid bilayer of biomembranes and the structure and function of these proteins are closely related to their interactions with lipid molecules. Structural analyses of interactions between membrane proteins and lipids or...
Statins are widely used to inhibit cholesterol synthesis and help prevent cardiovascular diseases associated with elevated blood cholesterol levels. Several clinical trials have shown that some of the benefits observed with statins are independent of...
Odor detection and discrimination in mammals is known to be initiated by membrane-bound G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). The role that the lipid membrane may play in odor discrimination, however, is less well understood. Here, we used model membr...
Supported lipid bilayers are artificial lipid bilayer membranes existing at the interface between solid substrates and aqueous solution. Surface structures and properties of the solid substrates affect the formation process, fluidity, two-dimensional...
Biomimetic membrane systems play a crucial role in the field of biosensor engineering. Over the years, significant progress has been achieved creating artificial membranes by various strategies from vesicle fusion to Langmuir transfer approaches to m...
In this paper a rapid and highly efficient method for controlled incorporation of fluorescent lipids into living mammalian cells is introduced. Here, the fluorescent molecules have two consecutive functions: First, they trigger rapid membrane fusion...
Lipid ordering in cell membranes has been increasingly recognized as an important factor in establishing and regulating a large variety of biological functions. Multiple investigations into lipid organization focused on assessing ordering from temper...
The lipid bilayer is a basic building block of biological membranes and can be pictured as a barrier separating two compartments filled with electrolyte solution. Artificial planar lipid bilayers are therefore commonly used as model systems to study...
To understand the behavior of cellular interfaces, it is important to clarify the effect of chemical compounds on artificial cell membranes. In this study, an aqueous acetonitrile solution was mixed with a suspension of lipid vesicles, and the change...
Lipid bilayers are natural barriers of biological cells and cellular compartments. Membrane proteins integrated in biological membranes enable vital cell functions such as signal transduction and the transport of ions or small molecules. In order to...
A nanosensory membrane device was constructed for detecting liposome fusion through changes in an enzymatic activity. Inspired by a biological signal transduction system, the device design involved functionalized liposomal membranes prepared by self-...
Ultrasound can alter the state of lipid membranes through mechanical, thermal, and sonochemical effects. Moving beyond the view of membranes as passive carriers, this review examines membranes as both targets of ultrasound-induced stimuli and tunable...
The modified 1,2-benzothiazine analogues designed as new drug candidates and discussed in this paper are oxicam derivatives. Oxicams are a class of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Their biological target is cyclooxygenase (COX), a mem...
Artificial lipid bilayer systems, such as vesicles, black membranes, and supported lipid bilayers (SLBs), are valuable platforms for studying ion channels at the molecular level. The reconstitution of the ion channels in an active form is a crucial p...
Background: The transformation of the supported lipid bilayer (SLB) membrane by extracted cytosol from living resources, has recently drawn much attention. It enables us to address the question of whether the purified phospholipid SLB membrane, inclu...
Melittin, the main toxic component in the venom of the European honeybee, interacts with natural and artificial membranes due to its amphiphilic properties. Rather than interacting with a specific receptor, melittin interacts with the lipid component...
Artificial lipid bilayers are an essential tool to investigate channel forming proteins. A particular challenge is to study antibiotic uptake through bacterial porins requiring low volume and parallelization. Here, we present a lipid bilayer silicon...
Artificial membrane systems can serve as models to investigate molecular mechanisms of different cellular processes, including transport, pore formation, and viral fusion. However, the current, such as SUVs, GUVs, and the supported lipid bilayers suf...
Quality control of herbal medicines remain a challenging issue towardsintegrating phytomedicine into the primary health care system. As medicinal plants is acomplicated system of mixtures, a rapid and cost-effective evaluation method tocharacterize t...
The mechanisms of action of pyrimidine nucleoside derivatives on model lipid membranes of various compositions were studied. A systematic analysis of the tested agents’ effects on the membrane physicochemical properties was performed. Different...
A major parameter controlling the extent and rate of oral drug absorption is permeability through the lipid bilayer of intestinal epithelial cells. Here, a biomimetic artificial membrane permeability assay (Franz–PAMPA Pampa) was validated usin...
The aim of this research was to investigate the stability of a lidocaine-loaded nanostructured lipid carrier dispersion at different temperatures, formulate a nanostructured lipid carrier gel, and test the penetration profile of lidocaine from the na...
In the present investigation we studied the molecular mechanisms of the monodesmosidic saponin digitonin on natural and artificial membranes. We measured the hemolytic activity of digitonin on red blood cells (RBCs). Also different lipid membrane mod...
The bilayer lipid membrane (BLM) is the main structural component of cell membranes, in which various membrane proteins are embedded. Artificially formed BLMs have been used as a platform in studies of the functions of membrane proteins, including va...
Effective R&D and strict quality control of a broad range of foods, beverages, and pharmaceutical products require objective taste evaluation. Advanced taste sensors using artificial-lipid membranes have been developed based on concepts of global sel...
The retroviral Gag protein targets the plasma membrane of infected cells for viral particle formation and release. The matrix domain (MA) of Gag is myristoylated for membrane anchoring but also contains a highly basic region that recognizes acidic ph...
A group of seven peptides from spider venom with diverse sequences constitute the latarcin family. They have been described as membrane-active antibiotics, but their lipid interactions have not yet been addressed. Using circular dichroism and solid-s...
Pore-forming toxins are alluring tools for delivering biologically-active, impermeable cargoes to intracellular environments by introducing large conductance pathways into cell membranes. However, the lack of regulation often leads to the dissipation...
As part of a program aimed to obtain antioxidants able to interact with cell membrane, edaravone (EdV, 3-methyl-1-phenyl-2-pyrazolin-5-one), a well-known free radical scavenger, has been modified by alkylation at its allylic position (4) with a C-18...
The cells of living organisms are surrounded by the biological membranes that form a barrier between the internal and external environment of the cells. Cell membranes serve as barriers and gatekeepers. They protect cells against the entry of undesir...
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