15 Facts About Lipid bilayer

Lipid bilayer is a thin polar membrane made of two layers of lipid molecules.

The lipid bilayer is the barrier that keeps ions, proteins and other molecules where they are needed and prevents them from diffusing into areas where they should not be.

The bilayer can adopt a solid gel phase state at lower temperatures but undergo phase transition to a fluid state at higher temperatures, and the chemical properties of the lipids' tails influence at which temperature this happens.

The packing of lipids within the bilayer affects its mechanical properties, including its resistance to stretching and bending.

The center of this Lipid bilayer contains almost no water and excludes molecules like sugars or salts that dissolve in water.

Lipid bilayer asymmetry arises, at least in part, from the fact that most phospholipids are synthesised and initially inserted into the inner monolayer: those that constitute the outer monolayer are then transported from the inner monolayer by a class of enzymes called flippases.

The partitioning ability of the lipid bilayer is based on the fact that hydrophilic molecules cannot easily cross the hydrophobic bilayer core, as discussed in Transport across the bilayer below.

Alternatively, some membrane proteins penetrate all the way through the Lipid bilayer and serve to relay individual signal events from the outside to the inside of the cell.

Lipid bilayer is a very difficult structure to study because it is so thin and fragile.

Electroporation is the rapid increase in Lipid bilayer permeability induced by the application of a large artificial electric field across the membrane.

In contrast to Ka, which is a measure of how much energy is needed to stretch the Lipid bilayer, Kb is a measure of how much energy is needed to bend or flex the Lipid bilayer.

Since the lipid bilayer is the barrier between the interior and exterior of the cell, it is the site of extensive signal transduction.

Researchers over the years have tried to harness this potential to develop a Lipid bilayer-based device for clinical diagnosis or bioterrorism detection.

Around the same time, the development of model membranes confirmed that the lipid bilayer is a stable structure that can exist independent of proteins.

In 1977, a totally synthetic Lipid bilayer membrane was prepared by Kunitake and Okahata, from a single organic compound, didodecyldimethylammonium bromide.