Recent epidemiological studies show a reduced prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in patients treated with inhibitors of cholesterol biosynthesis. Moreover, the cholesterol-transport protein, apolipoprotein E4, and elevated cholesterol are important risk factors for AD. Additionally, in vitro and in vivo studies show that intracellular cholesterol levels can modulate the processing of amyloi...

Lipid rafts play important roles in cellular functions through concentrating or sequestering membrane proteins. This requires proteins to differ in the stability of their interactions with lipid rafts. However, knowledge of the dynamics of membrane protein-raft interactions is lacking. We employed FRAP to measure in live cells the lateral diffusion of influenza hemagglutinin (HA) proteins that ...

Reversible Addition–Fragmentation chain Transfer (RAFT) polymerization has emerged as one of the most versatile reversible deactivation radical polymerization techniques and is capable of polymerizing a wide range of monomers under various conditions. One of the most important factors governing the success of a RAFT polymerization is the fraction of living chains at the end of the reaction, whi...

The function and mode of action of curcumin in modulating the formation of lipid raft domains were investigated by microscopic observation using model membranes. Curcumin induces fusion of lipid raft domains at extremely low concentrations through the alteration of the boundary between the ordered and disordered phases.

Several simplified membrane models featuring coexisting liquid disordered (Ld) and ordered (Lo) lipid phases have been developed to mimic the heterogeneous organization of cellular membranes, and thus, aid our understanding of the nature and functional role of ordered lipid-protein nanodomains, termed "rafts". In spite of their greatly reduced complexity, quantitative characterization of local ...

Lipid rafts are specialized, cholesterol-rich membrane compartments that help to organize transmembrane signaling by restricting or promoting interactions with subsets of the cellular proteome. The hypothesis driving this study was that identifying proteins whose relative abundance in rafts is altered by the abused psychostimulant methamphetamine would contribute to fully describing the pathway...

Abstract The floating raft vibration isolation system includes upper and lower isolators middle raft. As one of the most important parts that affect performance isolation, is usually assumed to be an undamped or viscous damping structure in analysis, which different from actual situation. To study effects with hysteresis characteristics, a three-freedom complex stiffness mechanical model was bu...

Plasma membrane compartmentalization imposes lateral segregation on membrane proteins that is important for regulating signal transduction. We use computational modeling of immunogold spatial point patterns on intact plasma membrane sheets to test different models of inner plasma membrane organization. We find compartmentalization at the nanoscale level but show that a classical raft model of p...

“Living” polymer networks have the ability to grow in size and mass after initial polymerization through insertion of new monomers. In this work, a one-pot method is used prepare “living” modify their mechanical properties via photo-electron/energy transfer reversible addition-fragmentation chain (PET-RAFT) photopolymerization method. The are made from company-bought constituents (N,N-dimethyla...