Pore-forming compounds are attracting much attention due to the signal transduction ability for the development of highly sensitive biosensing. In this review, we describe an overview of the recent advances made by our group in the design of molecular sensing interfaces of spherical and planar lipid bilayers and natural bilayers. The potential uses of pore-forming compounds, such as gramicidin ...

In this work we studied by DSC the interaction of three antigenic overlapping peptides belonging to the E2 envelope protein of Hepatitis G virus, namely E2(39-53), E2(32-53) and E2(26-53), with liposomes of different lipid composition (DPPC, DMPC and DMPG) as biomembrane models. The effect of the three selected peptides on the thermotropic behaviour of lipid bilayers has been evaluated.

One of the most fascinating properties of lipid membranes is that they easily deform their shapes according to external circumstances, which gives them the basic physical aspects of biomembrane functionalities such as endocytosis and exocytosis in biomembrane transport. These shape deformations well described by an area-difference free energy (ADE) model [1], which consists of two terms, the He...

Investigation of cell membrane structure and dynamics requires high spatial and temporal resolution. The spatial resolution of conventional light microscopy is limited due to the diffraction of light. However, recent developments in microscopy enabled us to access the nano-scale regime spatially, thus to elucidate the nanoscopic structures in the cellular membranes. In this review, we will expl...

1 The Key Laboratory of Cell Proliferation and Differentiation of Ministry of Education and The State Key Laboratory of Biomembrane and Membrane Bio-engineering, College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P. R. China, The Center for Theoretical Biology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P. R. China, Institute of Virology, Zhejiang Provincial Center For Disease Prevention and ...