Lateral Organization Of Cell Membrane

published: 19 November 2010 doi: 10.3389/fphys.2010.00153

Review ARticle

Lipids and membrane lateral organization
Sandro Sonnino and Alessandro Prinetti*
Department of Medical Chemistry,Biochemistry and Biotechnology, University of Milano, Milano, Italy

Edited by: Manuel Jose Prieto, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal Reviewed by: Nicoletta Kahya, University Medical CenterGroningen, Netherlands Luis M. S. Loura, University of Coimbra, Portugal *Correspondence: Alessandro Prinetti, Dipartimento di Chimica, Biochimica e Biotecnologie per la Medicina, Via Fratelli Cervi 93, 20090Segrate, Milano, Italy. e-mail, alessandro.prinetti@unimi.it

Shortly after the elucidation of the very basic structure and properties of cellular membranes, it became evident that cellularmembranes are highly organized structures with multiple and multi-dimensional levels of order. Very early observations suggested that the lipid components of biological membranes might be active players inthe creation of these levels of order. In the late 1980s, several different and diverse experimental pieces of evidence coalesced together giving rise to the lipid raft hypothesis. Lipid rafts becameenormously (and, in the opinion of these authors, sometimes acritically) popular, surprisingly not just within the lipidologist community (who is supposed to be naturally sensitive to the fascination oflipid rafts). Today, a PubMed search using the key word “lipid rafts” returned a list of 3767 papers, including 690 reviews (as a term of comparison, searching over the same time span for a very hotlipid-related key word, “ceramide” returned 6187 hits with 799 reviews), and a tremendous number of different cellular functions have been described as “lipid raft-dependent. However, a clearconsensus ” definition of lipid raft has been proposed only in recent times, and the basic properties, the ruling forces, and even the existence of lipid rafts in living cells has been recently matter of...