Life places extreme demands on the material properties of the membranes that surrounds cells. These thin bilayers must be both rigid enough to define the cell structure yet flexible enough to undergo dramatic changes in cell shape in processes like endocytosis and cell division. In turn, the properties of the biomembranes are determined by the unique characteristics of the thousands of...
Curved cell membranes are important for the function of the cell, both for compartmentalization in organelles within the cell as well as for cellular mitosis. It has also been shown that the curvature of a lipid membrane can affect the concentration of membrane bound proteins. In this project we have used semiconductor nanowires to study the effect of curvature on phospholipid bilayers and...
DNA origami is emerged as a powerful and versatile method to fabricate highly controllable 3-dimensional structures at the nanometer-scale. One example of those powerful DNA nanostructures is a membrane-spanning DNA channel, which exhibited the ability to mimic the biological channels in transporting of ions and biomolecules across the lipid membrane (Burns et...
The skin barrier function is primarily located in the outermost layer of the skin, the stratum corneum (SC) and is comprised of corneocytes (dead cells) and intercellular lipids. The main lipid classes in the SC are ceramides, free fatty acids, and cholesterol. These lipids form two crystalline lamellar phases, with a repeat distance of 13 nm and 6 nm, respectively. The composition and...
