Membrane lipids hop in and out of rafts in the blink of an eye

A team of researchers led by Akihiro Kusumi and Kenichi Suzuki of iCeMS has found that molecules move into and out of a specialized region of the cell membrane, called the ‘raft domain’, at unexpectedly fast rates. The discovery was made possible by developing fluorescent compounds that are structurally similar to a special class of lipids called sphingomyelins, and by using a home-built fluorescent microscope sensitive enough to detect single fluorescent molecules.

This research was published online on March 22, 2017 in The Journal of Cell Biology

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Kyoto University | Membrane lipids hop in and out of rafts in the blink of an eye