Uncovering the private lives of lipids with new chemogenetic imaging approaches

Itay Budin

University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA, ibudin@ucsd.edu

Cell membranes are composed of hundreds of different lipid species that are distributed across organelles in a highly anisotropic manner. This heterogeneity is now thought to be driven primarily by protein machinery, including cytosolic lipid transfer proteins that act at organelle contact sites and flippases/scramblases that dictate transbilayer distributions. A long-standing challenge in cell biology has been to quantitatively image lipid pools at the length scale relevant for investigating these transport processes. In this talk, I will focus on new chemical biology approaches our lab has developed to map phospholipids in cells and determine factors that control their trafficking and transbilayer distributions. A key advance has been the use of fluorogenic dyes for biorthogonal labeling reactions that allow compartment and leaflet-specific detection of phospholipid pools. These tools can be used to test the function of lipid transfer proteins and the mechanisms underlying membrane asymmetry in cells.

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