Search results for " Fluidity"
showing 10 items of 115 documents
Hong Kong-Palermo | Fluid Cities
2018
Being a modern university does not mean simply carrying out with rigor and commitment the role of an educational and research agency, but increasingly requires the need to open up to the city, the region and the world. It means extending our relationships by letting people and ideas navigate the long networks of knowledge, comparison and collaboration. For this reason the University of Palermo is decisively increasing its activity of internationalization and of openness to the inputs that come from the society of widespread knowledge in which we are immersed. In the liquid society also the university must change its mission, capturing the transformations of the contemporary, renewing the mo…
Vibrio cholerae cytolysin: assembly and membrane insertion of the oligomeric pore are tightly linked and are not detectably restricted by membrane fl…
2000
AbstractHemolytic strains of Vibrio cholerae secrete a cytolysin that, upon binding as a monomer, forms pentameric pores in animal cell membranes. Pore formation is inhibited at low temperature and in the absence of cholesterol. We here posed the following questions: firstly, can oligomerization be observed in the absence of pore formation? Secondly, is membrane fluidity responsible for the effect of temperature or of cholesterol upon pore formation? The first issue was approached by chemical cross-linking, by electrophoretic heteromer analysis, and by electron microscopy. None of these methods yielded any evidence of a non-lytic pre-pore oligomer. The second question was addressed by the u…
A small HSP, Lo18, interacts with the cell membrane and modulates lipid physical state under heat shock conditions in a lactic acid bacterium
2005
International audience; The small heat shock proteins (sHSP) are characterized by a chaperone activity to prevent irreversible protein denaturation. This study deals with the sHSP Lo18 induced by multiple stresses in Oenococcus oeni, a lactic acid bacterium. Using in situ immunocytochemistry and cellular fractionation experiments, we demonstrated the association of Lo18 with the membrane in O. oeni cells submitted to heat shock. The same result was obtained after exposure of cells to ethanol or benzyl alcohol, agents known to have an influence on membranes. For the different stresses, the protein was located on the periphery of the cell at membrane level and was also found within the cytopl…
Effect of a hyperlipidic diet on lipid composition, fluidity, and (Na+-K+)ATPase activity of rat erythrocyte membranes.
1989
Feeding rats a hyperlipidic diet in which animals were offered daily a variety of high-energy food resulted in a significant increase of serum free fatty acids and a decrease of phospholipids with respect to controls. On the contrary, there were no significant differences in erythrocyte membrane total lipid composition between the two groups. Erythrocyte membranes showed a significant decrease in saturated fatty acid content and a significant increase in (n-6) polyunsaturated fatty acid content; (n-3) polyunsaturated fatty acids significantly decreased. Membrane fluidity, investigated by fluorescence polarization of diphenylhexatriene, significantly increased in the erythrocyte membranes of…
Time-resolved fluorescence and fourier transform infrared spectroscopic investigations of lateral packing defects and superlattice domains in composi…
2003
Time-resolved fluorescence and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopies were used to investigate the lateral organization of lipids in compositionally uniform and fully equilibrated 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-phosphatidylcholine/cholesterol (POPC/CHOL) liposomes prepared by a recently devised low-temperature trapping method. Independent fluorescence decay lifetime and rotational dynamics parameters of diphenylhexatriene (DPH) chain-labeled phosphatidylcholine (DPH-PC) in these liposomes were recovered from the time-resolved fluorescence measurements as a function of cholesterol molar fraction (X(CHOL)) at 23 degrees C. The results indicate significantly greater lifetime heterogeneity, shorter av…
Effect of ethanol on membrane fluidity of protoplasts fromSaccharomyces cerevisiae andKloeckera apiculata grown with or without ethanol, measured by …
1994
Direct measurements of membrane fluidity by fluorescence anisotropy of protoplasts fromKloeckera apiculata andSaccharomyces cerevisiae, a low and a high ethanol tolerant strain respectively, are presented. The comparison of the behaviour of the two strains grown with or without ethanol enabled us to demonstrate the existing relationship between ethanol tolerance and membrane fluidity.
Liver microsomal membrane fluidity and microsomal desaturase activities in adult spontaneously hypertensive rats.
1997
OBJECTIVE The purpose of the present study was to investigate liver microsomal membrane fluidity simultaneously with membrane fatty acid composition and desaturase activities in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). DESIGN AND METHODS The membrane fluidity was determined, after electron spin resonance (ESR) measurement, in SHR compared with normotensive Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats, by calculating the order parameter S from ESR spectra of 5-nitroxide stearate and 10-nitroxide stearate, used as spin-labelled fatty acids. Desaturase activities were measured by incubating SHR and WKY rat liver microsomes with [14C]-radiolabeled fatty acids as substrates for desaturation reactions. The fatty acid c…
Effects of the herbicides Benzoylpropethyl and flampropisopropyl on rat liver mitochondria : an alteration in membrane fluidity ?
1984
Abstract The action of the herbicides benzoylpropethyl and flampropisopropyl, and the corresponding unesterified acids was studied in rat liver mitochondria. The herbicides were found to (a) inhibit the mitochondrial electron transfer in complex III or at the level of ubiquinone (I50 of 4 nmol mg protein−1 for flampropisopropyl and 18 for benzoylpropethyl with succinate as a substrate); (b) have an additional (however less sensitive) site of inhibition near succinate dehydrogenase; and (c) interfere with energy transfer. Sensitivity was increased 2- (benzoylpropethyl) and 3.5-fold (flampropisopropyl) as the rats age increased from 12–13 weeks to 23–26 weeks. The free acids were far less eff…
Extremely rapid acclimation of Escherichia coli to high temperature over a few generations of a fed-batch culture during slow warming
2014
This study aimed to demonstrate that adequate slow heating rate allows two strains of Escherichia coli rapid acclimation to higher temperature than upper growth and survival limits known to be strain-dependent. A laboratory (K12-TG1) and an environmental (DPD3084) strain of E. coli were subjected to rapid (few seconds) or slow warming (1 degrees C 12 h(-1)) in order to (re) evaluate upper survival and growth limits. The slow warming was applied from the ancestral temperature 37 degrees C to total cell death 46-54 degrees C: about 30 generations were propagated. Upper survival and growth limits for rapid warming (46 degrees C) were lower than for slow warming (46-54 degrees C). The thermal l…
Unsaturated Fatty Acids Drive Disintegrin and Metalloproteinase (ADAM)-dependent Cell Adhesion, Proliferation, and Migration by Modulating Membrane F…
2011
The disintegrin-metalloproteinases ADAM10 and ADAM17 mediate the release of several cell signaling molecules and cell adhesion molecules such as vascular endothelial cadherin or L-selectin affecting endothelial permeability and leukocyte transmigration. Dysregulation of ADAM activity may contribute to the pathogenesis of vascular diseases, but the mechanisms underlying the control of ADAM functions are still incompletely understood. Atherosclerosis is characterized by lipid plaque formation and local accumulation of unsaturated free fatty acids (FFA). Here, we show that unsaturated FFA increase ADAM-mediated substrate cleavage. We demonstrate that these alterations are not due to genuine ch…