Scrutiny of the Failure of Lipid Membranes As A Function of Headgroups, Chain Length, and Lamellarity Measured by Scanning Force Microscopy

AbstractA fast, quantitative, and unambiguous screening of material properties of biomembranes using scanning force microscopy in pulsed force mode on lipid membranes is presented. The spatially resolved study of breakthrough force, breakthrough distance, adhesion, stiffness, and topography of lipid membranes as determined simultaneously by digitalized pulsed force mode provides new insight into the structure-function relationship of model membranes, which are systematically analyzed by varying chain length, lipid headgroup, and lamellarity. For this purpose, a novel unbiased analysis method is presented. A strong correlation between adhesion and breakthrough events is found on lipid bilaye…

Rasterkraftmikroskopische In-situ-Detektion von molekularen Erkennungsreaktionen an mikrostrukturierten Lipidmembransegmenten

Visualization of Molecular Recognition Events on Microstructured Lipid-Membrane Compartments by In Situ Scanning Force Microscopy This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (JA 963/1-2).

Lateral organization of G M1 in phase-separated monolayers visualized by scanning force microscopy

Phase separation of glycolipids in lipid mono- and bilayers is of great interest for the understanding of membrane function. The distribution of the ganglioside GM1 in sphingomyelin (SM)/1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl- sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (POPC), SM/1,2-dipalmitoyl- sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DOPC) and SM/cholesterol/POPC Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) monolayers transferred at 36 mN/m has been studied by scanning force microscopy. Besides lateral organization of the glycolipid in LB monolayers as deduced from topography, material properties have been investigated by phase imaging, pulsed force mode and force modulation microscopy. It was shown that GM1 preferentially clusters in an ordered lipid m…