Functional rafts in cell membranes

TL;DR: It is reported here that a considerable fraction of Fas is constitutively partitioned into sphingolipid‐ and cholesterol‐rich membrane rafts in mouse thymocytes as well as the L12.10‐Fas T cells, and Fas ligation promotes a rapid and specific recruitment of FADD and caspase‐8 to the rafts.

TL;DR: This paper covers representative achievements in the fabrication of artificial building blocks for life, cell-inspired biomimetic materials, and macromolecular assemblies mimicking the functions of natural materials and their applications and demonstrates that MSA has played an important and irreplaceable role in the grand and long-standing research of biomimetics and bio-inspired materials.

TL;DR: The organization of uniformly loaded peptide–MHC class II complexes in tetraspan domains may be a very early event that determines both the composition of the immunological synapse and the quality of the subsequent T helper cell response.

TL;DR: The pulsed field gradient (pfg)-NMR method for measurements of translational diffusion of molecules in macroscopically aligned lipid bilayers is described and the finding that the lateral diffusion is the same for all components, independent of the molecular structure (including cholesterol (CHOL), if they reside in the same domain or phase in the membrane is found.

TL;DR: It is shown that a protein with a glycosylphosphatidyl inositol (GPI) anchor can be recovered from lysates of epithelial cells in a low density, detergent-insoluble form, supporting the model proposed by Simons and colleagues for sorting of certain membrane proteins to the apical surface after intracellular association with glycosphingolipids.

TL;DR: Results strongly indicate that the bivalent antibodies produce an aggregation of the surface immunoglobulin molecules in the plane of the membrane, which can occur only if the immunoglOBulin molecules are free to diffuse in the membrane.

TL;DR: Polarized epithelial cells play fundamental roles in the ontogeny and function of a variety of tissues and organs in mammals and are the first overt sign of cellular differentiation in early embryonic development.

TL;DR: It is shown that caveolin interacts with another well characterized signal transducer, Ras, and that recombinant overexpression of caveolin in intact cells is sufficient to functionally recruit a nonfarnesylated mutant of Ras onto membranes, overcoming the normal requirement for lipid modification of Ras.