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E. Sevcsik:
"Creating obstacle courses for raft proteins - How micropatterning can help decipher plasma membrane organization";
Vortrag: Seminar Institut für Allgemeine Physik (IAP), TU Wien, IAP; 13.05.2014.

According to the prevailing theory, sterol- and sphingolipid enriched nanodomains exist in the mammalian plasma membrane but are too small and dynamic to allow for proper characterization. Attempts to artificially enhance putative tendencies in the plasma membrane to create optically resolvable phase separation have yielded new model systems like Giant Plasma Membrane Vesicles, bridging the gap between synthetic lipid bilayers and live cell membranes.
In this work, we take those approaches one step further and attempt to create large scale phase separation in a live cell situation. To this end, we use a micropatterning technique to artificially create regions in the PM of live cells where we use a model raft protein glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI-GFP) is immobilized and highly enriched (via surface-immobilzed antibodies) at different densities to monitor the effects on plasma membrane organization and properties.