Tim Levine
Dr Tim Levine is a professor of cell biology at University College London's Institute of Ophthalmology. He studies intracellular lipid traffic in budding yeast, has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles, and is the Editor-in-Chief of "Contact", a new journal about membrane contact sites.
A groovy kind of protein?
In the first of a series of blog posts on structural biology, we present researchfeatured recently in BMC Molecular and Cell Biology investigating new ways to understand how lipids reach their eventual location inside cells to form membranes.
Lipids are insoluble in water, so they are synthesized in a membrane bilayer that makes a separate phase, like a layer of oil forming on water (Figure 1). Since most lipid-synthesizing enzymes are localised to just one membrane, the endoplasmic reticulum in eukaryotic cells or the inner membrane of bacteria, there is a major question: how can lipids transfer to another membrane? A method that might work on the face of it is traffic of vesicles made
from membrane patches. However, the data do not support this. Traffic of vesicles in eukaryotic cells cannot provide lipids to organelles such as lipid droplets, mitochondria and peroxisomes. Even more definitively, the vast majority of cells that require lipid traffic are bacteria with 2 membranes (such as E. coli), which have no membrane vesicles. This means that life on earth solved the question of lipid traffic long before vesicular traffic evolved. This paper is part of a trend to return the field of lipid transfer back to it’s roots.
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