Cholesterol Perturbs Lipid Bilayers Non-Universally

By John F. Nagle, Jianjun Pan, T. T. Mills, S. Tristram-Nagle. 2008

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Despite the popular perception that cholesterol is unhealthy, it is a vital component in the membranes of mammalian cells, with concentrations varying up to 50 mol % of the total lipid in healthy cell plasma membranes [1]. Cholesterol is considered to be a key molecule for the formation of small rafts that have been implicated in providing favorable nano environments to facilitate biochemical functioning of membrane proteins [2]. Cholesterol is important in producing macroscopic fluidfluid phase separation that has been so strikingly visualized by fluorescence microscopy [3]. Not surprisingly, there is a large biophysical literature of cholesterol in lipid bilayers [4,5].

Subfields: Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/85bc2fc3f32a6f89bc9b6d245b0574a6c107595c