ArticleCommunications biology2019
Conventional analysis of movement on non-flat surfaces like the plasma membrane makes Brownian motion appear anomalous.
Article in Communications biology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- High-Speed Interferometric Scattering Tracking Microscopy of Compartmentalized Lipid Diffusion in Living Cells.Chemphyschem : a European journal of chemical physics and physical chemistry · 2025Article
- Membrane topography and the overestimation of protein clustering in single molecule localisation microscopy - identification and correction.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Diffusion Analyses along Mean and Gaussian-Curved Membranes with CurD.The journal of physical chemistry letters · 2024Article
- Synergistic factors control kinase-phosphatase organization in B-cells engaged with supported bilayers.Molecular biology of the cell · 2020Article
- Increased Confinement and Polydispersity of STIM1 and Orai1 after CaBiophysical journal · 2020Article
- Variations in Plasma Membrane Topography Can Explain Heterogenous Diffusion Coefficients Obtained by Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2020Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Cells are neither flat nor smooth, which has serious implications for prevailing plasma membrane models and cellular processes like cell signalling, adhesion and molecular clustering. Using probability distributions from diffusion simulations, we demonstrate that 2D and 3D Euclidean distance measurements substantially underestimate diffusion on non-flat surfaces. Intuitively, the shortest within surface distance (SWSD), the geodesic distance, should reduce this problem. The SWSD is accurate for foldable surfaces but, although it outperforms 2D and 3D Euclidean measurements, it still underestimates movement on deformed surfaces. We demonstrate that the reason behind the underestimation is that topographical features themselves can produce both super- and subdiffusion, i.e. the appearance of anomalous diffusion. Differentiating between topography-induced and genuine anomalous diffusion requires characterising the surface by simulating Brownian motion on high-resolution cell surface images and a comparison with the experimental data.
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