Membranes spun from small molecules

Transport of Ions and Small Molecules across Cell Membranes

The plasma membrane is a selectively permeable barrier between the cell and the extracellular environment. Its permeability properties ensure that essential molecules such as ions, glucose, amino acids, and lipids readily enter the cell, metabolic intermediates remain in the cell, and waste compounds leave the cell. In short, the selective permeability of the plasma membrane allows the cell to ...

INTERACTION OF PROTEINS WITH SMALL MOLECULES

Molecules Dancing in Membranes

In 1828, a botanist named Robert Brown found that small pollen particles suspended in water migrated in an erratic fashion. Later it was realized that the dance Brown observed was essentially a two-dimensional random walk driven by thermal fluctuations, thus this Brownian motion was more intense at higher temperatures. The pioneering ideas and observations by Brown have inspired people for a lo...

Applications of Small Molecules in Muscle Tissue Engineering

Introduction: Skeletal muscles account for about 40% of the total body weight. Every year, hundreds of people lose at least part of their muscle tissue due to illness, war, and accidents. This can lead to disruption of activities such as breathing, movement, and social life. To this end, various therapeutic strategies such as medication therapy, cell therapy and tissue transplantation have been...

Ulrike Eggert: Big things from small molecules

JCB • VOLUME 194 • NUMBER 3 • 2011 352 Y ou can learn a lot if you have the right tool to help your investigations along. But where those tools don’t exist, you may have to work on a different question. Ulrike Eggert isn’t about to let a little thing like the lack of a tool get in her way—she’ll just make her own. Since her postdoc in Tim Mitchison’s lab at Harvard (1), Eggert has used a combin...