There is an unmet medical need for the improvement of pancreatic islet maintenance in culture. Due to restricted donor availability it is essential to ameliorate islet viability and graft engraftment. The aim of this study was to compare the standard tissue culture techniques with the advanced Real Architecture For 3D Tissue (RAFT™) culture system in terms of viability and hormone production. H...

Prohibitin (PHB) plays a role in regulation of ultraviolet B light (UVB)-induced apoptosis of human keratinocytes, HaCaT cells. The regulatory function of PHB appears to be associated with its lipid raft translocation. However, the detailed mechanism for PHB-mediated apoptosis of these keratinocytes upon UVB irradiation is not clear. In this report, we determined the role of lipid raft transloc...

Compositional lipid domains (lipid rafts) in plasma membranes are believed to be important components of many cellular processes. The mechanisms by which cells regulate the sizes, lifetimes, and spatial localization of these domains are rather poorly understood at the moment. We propose a robust mechanism for the formation of finite-sized lipid raft domains in plasma membranes, the competition ...

Increased generation of amyloid peptide (A ) derived from amyloid precursor protein (APP) is the primary pathological characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, the sub cellular compartment in which APP undergoes cleavage by secretases to generate A is not precisely known. Compelling evidences suggest that amyloidogenic processing of APP occurs in lipid rafts. An indirect support for ...

The intestinotrophic and cytoprotective actions of glucagon-like peptide-2 (GLP-2) are mediated by the GLP-2 receptor (GLP-2R), a member of the class II glucagon-secretin G protein-coupled receptor superfamily. Although native GLP-2 exhibits a short circulating half-life, long-acting degradation-resistant GLP-2 analogues are being evaluated for therapeutic use in human subjects. Accordingly, we...

Lipid rafts are cholesterol-rich cell signaling platforms, and their physiological role can be explored by cholesterol depletion. To characterize transcriptional changes ongoing after lipid raft disruption in epidermal keratinocytes, a cell type that synthesizes its cholesterol in situ, we performed whole-genome expression profiling. Microarray results show that over 3,000 genes are differentia...

Dynamic lateral segregation of signaling proteins into microdomains is proposed to facilitate signal transduction; but constraints on microdomain size, mobility and diffusion that might realize this function are undefined. Here we interrogate a stochastic spatial model of the plasma membrane to determine how microdomains affect protein dynamics. Taking lipid rafts as a representative microdomai...

A membrane microdomain called raft has been under extensive study since the assembly of various signal-transducing molecules into this region has been envisaged. This domain is isolated as a low buoyant membrane fraction after the extraction with a nonionic detergent such as Triton X-100. The characteristic low density of this fraction is ascribed to the enrichment of several lipids including c...

Vaccinia virus infects a wide variety of mammalian cells from different hosts, but the mechanism of virus entry is not clearly defined. The mature intracellular vaccinia virus contains several envelope proteins mediating virion adsorption to cell surface glycosaminoglycans; however, it is not known how the bound virions initiate virion penetration into cells. For this study, we investigated the...

As shown earlier, raft-like domains resembling those thought to be present in natural cell membranes can be formed in supported planar lipid monolayers. These liquid-ordered domains coexist with a liquid-disordered phase and form in monolayers prepared both from synthetic lipid mixtures and lipid extracts of the brush border membrane of mouse kidney cells. The domains are detergent-resistant an...