Making Lipid Membranes Rough, Tough, and Ready to Hit the Road
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Making Lipid Membranes Rough, Tough, and Ready to Hit the Road Susan Daniel, Fernando Albertorio, and Paul S. Cremer Abstract Solid-supported lipid bilayers hold strong promise as bioanalytical sensor platforms because they readily mimic the same multivalent ligand–receptor interactions that occur in real cells. Such devices might be used to monitor air and water quality under real-world conditions. At present, however, supported membranes are considered too fragile to survive the harsh environments typically required for non-laboratory use. Specifically, they lack the resiliency to withstand air exposure and the thermal and mechanical stresses associated with device transport, storage, and continuous use over long periods of time. Several successful strategies are now emerging to make supported membranes tougher. These strategies incorporate mimics of the cytoskeleton and glycocalyx of real cell membranes. The promise of these more robust lipid bilayer architectures indicates that future materials should be designed to more fully resemble the actual structure of cell membranes. Keywords: biological, biomimetic, cellular, sensor.
having a caged canary alongside them as they worked. A canary is particularly sensitive to toxic gases and thus served as an early warning to miners of a health threat. Like a canary, the device should be easily transportable to the location of detection, robust enough to monitor the area reliably and continuously for months or even years, require little maintenance, and give few false positives. These new platforms will be tailored to mimic human responses and monitor pollutants that are specifically lethal to us. One promising detection platform uses solid-supported lipid bilayers5–8 as its central sensing component. Artificial membranes are unique materials that are especially suited for biomimetic devices. For example, they are composed of the same lipid and protein molecules that can be found in the plasma membranes of living cells. These synthetic bilayers preserve the lateral fluidity of their lipid constituents, just like natural cells.9–14 This is critical for the ability to carry out multivalent ligand–receptor interactions, whereby an incoming protein binds to multiple membrane-associated ligands via lateral rearrangement of the surface moieties (Figure 1). Multivalent binding can be especially critical for viruses like influenza for which each individual interaction is quite weak.15 Indeed, quite a few interactions are probably required in order to trigger infection. Supported membranes within lab-on-achip–type devices could be used for monitoring multiple toxins in parallel by
Introduction Even with all the tireless efforts of modern medical researchers to thwart deadly viral infections, society is still plagued by that indefatigable viral strain, influenza. Viral mutants such as the one responsible for the pandemic of 1918 have a vast history of killing populations, yet to date we have minimal, if any, protection against new and ever-increasing variations of pathogenic muta
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