Surface topography of membrane domains.
Elucidating origin, composition, size, and lifetime of microdomains in biological membranes remains a major issue for the understanding of cell biology. For lipid domains, the lack of a direct access to the behaviour of samples at the mesoscopic scale has constituted for long a major obstacle to their characterization, even in simple model systems made of immiscible binary mixtures. By its capacity to image soft surfaces with a resolution that extends from the molecular to the microscopic level, in air as well as under liquid, atomic force microscopy (AFM) has filled this gap and has become an inescapable tool in the study of the surface topography of model membrane domains, the first essential step for the understanding of biomembranes organization. In this review we mainly focus on the type of information on lipid microdomains in model systems that only AFM can provide. We will also examine how AFM can contribute to understand data acquired by a variety of other techniques and present recent developments which might open new avenues in model and biomembrane AFM applications.
Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, Unité 554, Montpellier, France.
Marie-Cécile
MC
Giocondi
Daisuke
D
Yamamoto
Eric
E
Lesniewska
Pierre-Emmanuel
PE
Milhiet
Toshio
T
Ando
Christian
C
Le Grimellec
D000818:Animals; D002784:Cholesterol / Q000737:chemistry; D006801:Humans; D008051:Lipid Bilayers / Q000737:chemistry*; D008563:Membrane Lipids / Q000737:chemistry*; D021962:Membrane Microdomains / Q000737:chemistry*; D008565:Membrane Proteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D018625:Microscopy, Atomic Force; D013107:Sphingolipids / Q000737:chemistry
D008051:Lipid Bilayers; D008563:Membrane Lipids; D008565:Membrane Proteins; D013107:Sphingolipids; D002784:Cholesterol