Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2010 Mar 19;104(11):118101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.118101. Epub 2010 Mar 17.
Compositional lipid microdomains ("lipid rafts") in mammalian plasma membranes are believed to facilitate many important cellular processes. While several physically distinct scenarios predicting the presence of finite-sized microdomains in vivo have been proposed in the past, direct experimental verification or falsification of model predictions has remained elusive. Herein, we demonstrate that the combination of the spatial correlation and temporal fluctuation spectra of the lipid domains can be employed to unambiguously differentiate between the existing theoretical scenarios. Furthermore, the differentiation of the raft formation mechanisms using this methodology can be achieved by collecting data at physiologically relevant conditions without the need to tune control parameters.
哺乳动物质膜中的组成脂质微区（“脂质筏”）被认为有助于许多重要的细胞过程。虽然过去已经提出了几种预测体内存在有限大小的微区的物理上不同的情景，但对模型预测的直接实验验证或证伪仍然难以实现。在此，我们证明了脂质域的空间相关和时间波动谱的组合可用于明确区分现有的理论情景。此外，通过在生理相关条件下收集数据而无需调整控制参数，可使用此方法区分筏形成机制。
