Department of Biochemistry - Weill Cornell Medical College

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Host:  Eric Underbakke

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"Flipping Lipids Across Membranes"

Transferring a lipid from one side of a membrane bilayer to the other side is energetically expensive and occurs rarely.  Yet lipid flipping is critical for cellular life. In metazoa, it is required for cellular growth and - surprisingly - for post-translational modifications of secretory proteins such as N-glycosylation, O-mannosylation and GPI-anchoring. 

In this lecture I will describe work that led to the discovery of a surprising phospholipid scramblase, a membrane protein capable of exchanging phospholipids between the two leaflets of a bilayer at a tremendous rate.  I will also describe what we know about the molecular mechanism of this process.