Centre for Vascular Research and Australian Centre for NanoMedicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Bioessays. 2012 Sep;34(9):739-47. doi: 10.1002/bies.201200044. Epub 2012 Jun 14.
Recently developed super-resolution microscopy techniques are changing our understanding of lipid rafts and membrane organisation in general. The lipid raft hypothesis postulates that cholesterol can drive the formation of ordered domains within the plasma membrane of cells, which may serve as platforms for cell signalling and membrane trafficking. There is now a wealth of evidence for these domains. However, their study has hitherto been hampered by the resolution limit of optical microscopy, making the definition of their properties problematic and contentious. New microscopy techniques circumvent the resolution limit and, for the first time, allow the fluorescence imaging of structures on length scales below 200 nm. This review describes such techniques, particularly as applied to the study of membrane organisation, synthesising newly emerging facets of lipid raft biology into a state-of-the art model.
最近发展起来的超分辨率显微镜技术正在改变我们对脂筏和一般细胞膜组织的理解。脂筏假说认为胆固醇可以驱动细胞质膜中有序结构域的形成，这些结构域可能作为细胞信号转导和膜运输的平台。现在有大量证据支持这些结构域的存在。然而，它们的研究迄今为止一直受到光学显微镜分辨率限制的阻碍，使得它们的特性定义成为一个有争议的问题。新的显微镜技术规避了分辨率限制，并且首次允许在低于 200nm 的长度尺度下对荧光成像结构进行成像。本文综述了这些技术，特别是将其应用于膜组织的研究，将脂质筏生物学的新出现的方面综合到一个最新的模型中。
