Publications by authors named "Kent J Wilson"

Despite longstanding excitement and progress toward understanding liquid-liquid phase separation in natural and artificial membranes, fundamental questions have persisted about which molecules are required for this phenomenon. Except in extraordinary circumstances, the smallest number of components that has produced large-scale, liquid-liquid phase separation in bilayers has stubbornly remained at three: a sterol, a phospholipid with ordered chains, and a phospholipid with disordered chains. This requirement of three components is puzzling because only two components are required for liquid-liquid phase separation in lipid monolayers, which resemble half of a bilayer.

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Article Synopsis
  • Researchers use different methods to create giant unilamellar vesicles, but each method can produce vesicles with different amounts of lipids, even when using the same materials.
  • They studied the lipid ratios in vesicles made by five common methods and found that some methods have small differences while one method, emulsion transfer, had a much lower amount of cholesterol than expected.
  • The results suggest that small changes in lipid ratios can be really affected by the method used, but experiments that change lipid ratios more dramatically will be less affected by these variations.
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Unlabelled: Researchers choose different methods of making giant unilamellar vesicles in order to satisfy different constraints of their experimental designs. A challenge of using a variety of methods is that each may produce vesicles of different lipid compositions, even if all vesicles are made from a common stock mixture. Here, we use mass spectrometry to investigate ratios of lipids in vesicles made by five common methods: electroformation on indium tin oxide slides, electroformation on platinum wires, gentle hydration, emulsion transfer, and extrusion.

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Unlabelled: Despite longstanding excitement and progress toward understanding liquid-liquid phase separation in natural and artificial membranes, fundamental questions have persisted about which molecules are required for this phenomenon. Except in extraordinary circumstances, the smallest number of components that has produced large-scale, liquid-liquid phase separation in bilayers has stubbornly remained at three: a sterol, a phospholipid with ordered chains, and a phospholipid with disordered chains. This requirement of three components is puzzling because only two components are required for liquid-liquid phase separation in lipid monolayers, which resemble half of a bilayer.

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