Intermembrane docking reactions are regulated by membrane curvature.

The polymorphism of eukaryotic cellular membranes is a tightly regulated and well-conserved phenotype. Recent data have revealed important regulatory roles of membrane curvature on the spatio-temporal localization of proteins and in membrane fusion. Here we quantified the influence of membrane curvature on the efficiency of intermembrane docking reactions.

Mixing subattolitre volumes in a quantitative and highly parallel manner with soft matter nanofluidics.

Handling and mixing ultrasmall volumes of reactants in parallel can increase the throughput and complexity of screening assays while simultaneously reducing reagent consumption. Microfabricated silicon and plastic can provide reliable fluidic devices, but cannot typically handle total volumes smaller than ∼1 × 10(-12) l. Self-assembled soft matter nanocontainers can in principle significantly improve miniaturization and biocompatibility, but exploiting their full potential is a challenge due to their small dimensions.

Single vesicle assaying of SNARE-synaptotagmin-driven fusion reveals fast and slow modes of both docking and fusion and intrasample heterogeneity.

Lipid mixing between vesicles functionalized with SNAREs and the cytosolic C2AB domain of synaptotagmin-1 recapitulates the basic Ca(2+) dependence of neuronal exocytosis. However, in the conventional ensemble lipid mixing assays it is not possible to discriminate whether Ca(2+) accelerates the docking or the fusion of vesicles. Here we report a fluorescence microscopy-based assay to monitor SNARE-mediated docking and fusion of individual vesicle pairs.

Boron nanoparticles inhibit tumour growth by boron neutron capture therapy in the murine B16-OVA model.

Background: Boron neutron capture therapy usually relies on soluble, rather than particulate, boron compounds. This study evaluated the use of a novel boron nanoparticle for boron neutron capture therapy.

Materials And Methods: Two hundred and fifty thousand B16-OVA tumour cells, pre-incubated with boron nanoparticles for 12 hours, were injected subcutaneously into C57BL/6J mice.

A fluorescence-based technique to construct size distributions from single-object measurements: application to the extrusion of lipid vesicles.

We report a novel approach to quantitatively determine complete size distributions of surface-bound objects using fluorescence microscopy. We measure the integrated intensity of single particles and relate it to their size by taking into account the object geometry and the illumination profile of the microscope, here a confocal laser scanning microscope. Polydisperse (as well as monodisperse) size distributions containing objects both below and above the optical resolution of the microscope are recorded and analyzed.