Lipid rafts and little caves

Cholesterol, lipid rafts, and disease.

Lipid rafts and insulin signaling.

Lipid rafts are domains within the plasma membrane that are enriched in cholesterol and lipids with saturated acyl chains. Specific proteins, including many signaling proteins, segregate into lipid rafts, and this process is important for certain signal transduction events in a variety of cell types. Within the past decade, data have emerged from many laboratories that implicate lipid rafts as ...

Lipid rafts and redox signaling.

In addition to the amplifying action of enzymes in the cell-signaling cascade, another important mechanism has been shown to amplify the signals massively when ligands bind to their receptors, which is characterized by clustering of membrane lipid microdomains or lipid rafts and formation of various signaling platforms. In this process, many receptor molecules aggregate on stimulation, thereby ...

Lipid rafts and membrane dynamics.

Cell membranes contain a variety of lipid species that differ in their physico-chemical properties. Lipid-lipid immiscibility gives rise to lateral heterogeneities in the membrane plane, a subset of which are termed lipid rafts (Simons and Vaz, 2004). Originally defined biochemically as detergentresistant membrane (DRM) fractions, lipid rafts are proposed to be highly dynamic, submicroscopic as...

Membrane organization and lipid rafts.

Cell membranes are composed of a lipid bilayer, containing proteins that span the bilayer and/or interact with the lipids on either side of the two leaflets. Although recent advances in lipid analytics show that membranes in eukaryotic cells contain hundreds of different lipid species, the function of this lipid diversity remains enigmatic. The basic structure of cell membranes is the lipid bil...