Oxygen quenching of pyrene-lipid fluorescence in phosphatidylcholine vesicles. A probe for membrane organization.

Oxygen quenching has been used as an alternative method to study the temperature dependence of the apparent excimer formation constant, kdm, of N-(10-[1-pyrene]-decanoyl)-sphingomyelin (Pyr-SPM) in 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-L-alpha-phosphatidylcholine (POPC) multilamellar vesicles. In conjunction with the lifetime of Pyr-SPM monomer in the absence of excimer and oxygen, kdm can be determined from the measurements of the monomer intensity as a function of oxygen concentration. The advantage of this method is that kdm can be determined without knowledge of the excimer lifetime and intensity, and without knowledge of the true concentration of oxygen in lipid bilayers. Our results show that kdm increases monotonically with temperature from 16 to 40 degrees C, becomes insensitive to temperature from 40 to 50 degrees C and increases again at 54 degrees C. The temperature-insensitive region corresponds to the temperature range of the phase transition of Pyr-SPM determined by differential scanning calorimetry. This result suggests the existence of Pyr-SPM-enriched domains in POPC vesicles. In contrast, no abrupt change in kdm with temperature occurs in the case of 1-palmitoyl-2-[10-(1-pyrenyl) decanoyl] phosphatidylcholine (Pyr-PC).