Phospholipid

Abstract: A significant modification to the additive all-atom CHARMM lipid force field (FF) is developed and applied to phospholipid bilayers with both choline and ethanolamine containing head groups and with both saturated and unsaturated aliphatic chains. Motivated by the current CHARMM lipid FF (C27 and C27r) systematically yielding values of the surface area per lipid that are smaller than experimental estimates and gel-like structures of bilayers well above the gel transition temperature, selected torsional, Lennard-Jones and partial atomic charge parameters were modified by targeting both quantum mechanical (QM) and experimental data. QM calculations ranging from high-level ab initio calculations on small molecules to semiempirical QM studies on a 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-phosphatidylcholine (DPPC) bilayer in combination with experimental thermodynamic data were used as target data for parameter optimization. These changes were tested with simulations of pure bilayers at high hydration of the following six lipids: ...

Abstract: The reasons for the great variety of lipids found in biological membranes, and the relations between lipid composition and membrane function pose major unsolved problems in membrane biology. Perhaps the only major functional role of lipids which may be regarded as firmly established involves the bilayer structure of biological membranes. The observations that biological membranes contain regions of bilayer structure, and that model systems consisting of naturally occurring and synthetic phospholipids often spontaneously adopt such a configuration on hydration, provide strong evidence that the lipid component is responsible for the basic biomembrane structure. The fact remains however, that a single phospholipid species such as phosphatidylcholine could satisfy such structural requirements. In this context, the observation that a typical mammalian cell membrane contains one hundred or more distinctly different tipids implicitly suggests that lipids play other functional roles. In this review we shall indicate alternative functional roles arising from a property of lipids which has not received the serious attention it deserves in recent years, namely the ability of lipids to adopt nonbilayer configurations in addition to the bilayer phase. This ability implies a view of biological membranes which differs from previous models such as the fluid mosaic model of Singer and Nicolson or the earlier unit membrane model. It is therefore appropriate to briefly review the possible functional roles of lipids in terms of these earlier models so that the requirement for an alternative approach becomes apparent.

Abstract: The measurement of lipid phosphate is proposed as an indicator of microbial biomass in marine and estuarine sediments. This relatively simple assay can be performed on fresh, frozen or frozen-lyophilized sediment samples with chloroform methanol extraction and subsequent phosphate determination. The sedimentary lipid phosphate recovery correlates with the extractible ATP and the rate of DNA synthesis. Pulse-chase experiments show active metabolism of the sedimentary phospholipids. The recovery of added 14C-labeled bacterial lipids from sediments is quantitative. Replicate analyses from a single sediment sample gave a standard deviation of 11%. The lipid extract can be fractionated by relatively simple procedures and the plasmalogen, diacyl phospholipid, phosphonolipid and non-hydrolyzable phospholipid content determined. The relative fatty acid composition can be readily determined by gas-liquid chromatography. The lipid composition can be used to define the microbial community structure. For example, the absence of polyenoic fatty acids indicates minimal contamination with benthic micro-eukaryotes. Therefore the high content of plasmalogen phospholipids in these sediments suggests that the anaerobic prokaryotic Clostridia are found in the aerobic sedimentary horizon. This would require anaerobic microhabitats in the aerated zones.

Abstract: Anti-phospholipid (aPL) antibodies that exhibit binding in cardiolipin (CL) ELISA can be purified to greater than 95% purity by sequential phospholipid affinity and ion-exchange chromatography. However, these highly purified aPL antibodies do not bind to the CL antigen when assayed by a modified CL ELISA in which the blocking agent does not contain bovine serum, nor do they bind to phospholipid affinity columns. Binding to the phospholipid antigen will only occur if normal human plasma, human serum, or bovine serum is present, suggesting that the binding of aPL antibodies to CL requires the presence of a plasma/serum cofactor. Using sequential phospholipid affinity, gel-filtration, and ion-exchange chromatography, we have purified this cofactor to homogeneity and shown that the binding of aPL antibodies to CL requires the presence of this cofactor in a dose-dependent manner. N-terminal region sequence analysis of the molecule has identified the cofactor as beta 2-glycoprotein I (beta 2GPI) (apolipoprotein H), a plasma protein known to bind to anionic phospholipids. These findings indicate that the presence of beta 2GPI is an absolute requirement for antibody-phospholipid interaction, suggesting that bound beta 2GPI forms the antigen to which aPL antibodies are directed. Recent evidence indicates that beta 2GPI exerts multiple inhibitory effects on the coagulation pathway and platelet aggregation. Interference with the function of beta 2GPI by aPL antibodies could explain the thrombotic diathesis seen in association with these antibodies.

Abstract: α-Synuclein is a highly conserved presynaptic protein of unknown function. A mutation in the protein has been causally linked to Parkinson's disease in humans, and the normal protein is an abundant component of the intraneuronal inclusions (Lewy bodies) characteristic of the disease. α-Synuclein is also the precursor to an intrinsic component of extracellular plaques in Alzheimer's disease. The α-synuclein sequence is largely composed of degenerate 11-residue repeats reminiscent of the amphipathic α-helical domains of the exchangeable apolipoproteins. We hypothesized that α-synuclein should associate with phospholipid bilayers and that this lipid association should stabilize an α-helical secondary structure in the protein. We report that α-synuclein binds to small unilamellar phospholipid vesicles containing acidic phospholipids, but not to vesicles with a net neutral charge. We further show that the protein associates preferentially with vesicles of smaller diameter (20–25 nm) as opposed to larger (∼125 nm) vesicles. Lipid binding is accompanied by an increase in α-helicity from 3% to approximately 80%. These observations are consistent with a role in vesicle function at the presynaptic terminal.