Abstract
Recall from Chap. 1 that it took a visit to Papua New Guinea in the mid-1950s. At that time a rare but fatal disease, kuru, had broken out among the primitive Fore people. In response to what was clearly an unusual happening, the epidemiologist Carleton Gajdusek (1923–2008) traveled to the region at the invitation of the local medical officer, Vincent Zigas. Once he was in the region Gajdusek discovered that the disease was being transmitted by means of funerary cannibalistic feasts involving ingestion of brain tissue.
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Appendix. Lipid Membrane Composition and Biophysical Properties
Appendix. Lipid Membrane Composition and Biophysical Properties
The mobility properties of the constituents of biological membranes depend both on the amount of cholesterol and the type of lipids present. Membrane lipids consist of a head group, a backbone, and a tail region (Fig. 7.10). Phosphoglycerides contain a glycerol backbone, whereas sphingolipids utilize sphingosine. Lipids found in biological membranes vary in acyl chain length and degree of saturation. Chains possess an even numbers of carbons typically between 14 and 24 with 16, 18, and 20. Chains with one or more doubly bonded carbons are unsaturated. These bonds are rigid and introduce kinks in the chain. These kinks cause irregularities or voids to appear in the array and, consequently, these molecules cannot be packed tightly. In contrast, in a fully saturated acyl chain the carbon–carbon atoms are covalently linked by single bonds. These carbon atoms are able to maximize the number of bonds with hydrogen atoms. As a result the chains can freely rotate about their carbon–carbon bonds and can pack tightly.
Cholesterol plays an important role in determining the fluidity of the membrane compartments. It is smaller than the phospholipids and sphingolipids. As the concentration of cholesterol increases the lipid membrane becomes less like a disordered gel and more like an ordered liquid in which the lipids are more tightly packed together. Three main types of lipid membranes are illustrated in Fig. 7.11. The upper panel depicts a liquid disordered membrane composed of unsaturated and fairly short phosphatidylcholine (or phosphatidylethanolamine) lipid molecules. At the other extreme the bottom panel illustrates the organization of a membrane composed of longer, saturated and fairly straight sphingomyelin molecules plus a considerable amount of cholesterol. This membrane structure is typical of a lipid raft .
The biophysical properties of these membrane compartments are captured by phase diagrams such as the one shown in Fig. 7.12. This diagram summarizes the possible phases exhibited by mixtures containing various proportions of an unsaturated lipid, a saturated lipid, and cholesterol . In this figure, it can be seen that as the cholesterol content increases the liquid-ordered (l o) phase begins to dominate. Membrane compartments lacking cholesterol but with a high unsaturated lipid content are disordered (l d), while saturated lipids generate gel-like (s o) structures.
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Beckerman, M. (2015). Prion Diseases. In: Fundamentals of Neurodegeneration and Protein Misfolding Disorders. Biological and Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22117-5_7
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