ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2009
Measurement of the membrane curvature preference of phospholipids reveals only weak coupling between lipid shape and leaflet curvature.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers.
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Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed.
- Flip Flop-Associated Growth and Division of Synthetic Cells.ACS nano · 2026Article
- Lipid-Substrate Interactions Lead to Bilayer Asymmetry.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2026Article
- Visualizing suborganellar lipid distribution using correlative light and electron microscopy.Nature cell biology · 2026Article
- Effects of lysophosphatidylcholine on the oxidative burst response, inflammatory cytokine secretion, andJDS communications · 2025Article
- Role of cardiolipin in proton transmembrane flux and localization.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- Curvature-Assisted Vesicle Explosion Under Light-Induced Asymmetric Oxidation.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- The Role of Phospholipid Alterations in Mitochondrial and Brain Dysfunction after Cardiac Arrest.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- A cholesterol switch controls phospholipid scrambling by G protein-coupled receptors.The Journal of biological chemistry · 2024Article
- Sorting of complex sphingolipids within the cellular endomembrane systems.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2024Review
- DNA-Programmed Lipid Nanoreactors for Synthesis of Carbohydrate Mimetics by Fusion of Aqueous Sub-attoliter Compartments.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2023Article
- Nanoscale membrane curvature sorts lipid phases and alters lipid diffusion.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
- The Transport of Charged Molecules across Three Lipid Membranes Investigated with Second Harmonic Generation.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Phosphatidic Acid Accumulates at Areas of Curvature in Tubulated Lipid Bilayers and Liposomes.Biomolecules · 2022Article
- Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Curved Lipid Membranes.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Review
- Molecular Shape Solution for Mesoscopic Remodeling of Cellular Membranes.Annual review of biophysics · 2022Review
- Assessing hypoxic damage to placental trophoblasts by measuring membrane viscosity of extracellular vesicles.Placenta · 2022Article
- Glycocalyx Curving the Membrane: Forces Emerging from the Cell Exterior.Annual review of cell and developmental biology · 2021Review
- Article
- The narrowing of dendrite branches across nodes follows a well-defined scaling law.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Mitochondrial Cristae Architecture and Functions: Lessons from Minimal Model Systems.Membranes · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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4 authors.
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Abstract
In biological processes, such as fission, fusion and trafficking, it has been shown that lipids of different shapes are sorted into regions with different membrane curvatures. This lipid sorting has been hypothesized to be due to the coupling between the membrane curvature and the lipid's spontaneous curvature, which is related to the lipid's molecular shape. On the other hand, theoretical predictions and simulations suggest that the curvature preference of lipids, due to shape alone, is weaker than that observed in biological processes. To distinguish between these different views, we have directly measured the curvature preferences of several lipids by using a fluorescence-based method. We prepared small unilamellar vesicles of different sizes with a mixture of egg-PC and a small mole fraction of N-nitrobenzoxadiazole (NBD)-labeled phospholipids or lysophospholipids of different chain lengths and saturation, and measured the NBD equilibrium distribution across the bilayer. We observed that the transverse lipid distributions depended linearly on membrane curvature, allowing us to measure the curvature coupling coefficient. Our measurements are in quantitative agreement with predictions based on earlier measurements of the spontaneous curvatures of the corresponding nonfluorescent lipids using X-ray diffraction. We show that, though some lipids have high spontaneous curvatures, they nevertheless showed weak curvature preferences because of the low values of the lipid molecular areas. The weak curvature preference implies that the asymmetric lipid distributions found in biological membranes are not likely to be driven by the spontaneous curvature of the lipids, nor are lipids discriminating sensors of membrane curvature.
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