A Monolayer Assay Tailored to Investigate Lipid–Protein Systems英文文献资料.pdfVIP

CHEMPHYSCHEM ARTICLES DOI: 10.1002/cphc.201300035 A Monolayer Assay Tailored to Investigate Lipid–Protein Systems Grzegorz Chwastek[b] and Petra Schwille*[a] Model membrane systems have become invaluable tools to in- miniaturised monolayer assay that can easily be combined vestigate specific features of cellular membranes. Although with standard analytical techniques such as confocal fluores- a variety of different experimental assays does exist, many of cence microscopy and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy them are rather complicated in their preparation and difficult (FCS). in their practical realisation. Here, we propose a new simple 1. Introduction For the last 30 years, biological membranes have been key ob- layer. This system lacks essential features of a biological mem- jects of biophysical research. Besides the obvious in vivo stud- brane, as it consists of only one layer of lipids deposited at ies on native cellular membranes, a large number of in vitro a water–air interface. However, it provides quantitative access methods and assays has been developed, in order to quantita- to parameters which can hardly be tuned in bilayer assays, but tively investigate biological processes under defined and well- which are nevertheless of great relevance for every potential controlled conditions. The most recent among these ap- interaction of proteins with the membrane, such as the pack- proaches can be summarised under the notation of so-called ing density of lipids. While monolayers have been validated for “minimal biological systems”[1] that are supposed to retain the protein-membrane binding assays,[10] their applications are still core of a biological p