Regensburg 2013 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 21: Membranes and Vesicles II

BP 21.1: Hauptvortrag

Mittwoch, 13. März 2013, 15:00–15:30, H46

Mimicking cellular membranes: lessons from reconstitution — •Eva Schmid — Department of Bioengineering, UC Berkeley, USA

Cellular membranes are much more than passive barriers that encapsulate biochemical reactions - they are actively involved in driving complex biological processes and play a critical role in the communication between cells and their surroundings. Biological membranes exhibit a meticulously controlled asymmetric distribution of phospholipids, and are populated by a surprisingly high density of proteins. It is now understood that proteins and lipids do not randomly diffuse in plane as a two-dimensional fluid but are laterally organized. However, it is not yet clear how this organization comes about and what physical consequences it has on different membrane processes such curvature generation, membrane fusion or the formation of membrane interfaces. Efforts to understand biological membranes are often held back by the interconnected complexity of biochemical reactions in the cell. An emerging complementary approach to traditional biological research is to build cellular features component-by-component from the bottom up, thereby isolating the pathway of interest.

This talk will describe recent in vitro reconstitution experiments using purified lipids and proteins that suggest how physical boundary conditions can be essential and sufficient regulators of membrane organization.