Artificial And Reconstituted Membrane Systems

Artificial and Reconstituted Membrane Systems

This collection of 11 chapters is devoted to a survey of artificial and reconsti tuted membrane systems. These are fundamental themes and areas of great current importance in membrane biochemistry. They also relate well to the founding concept of this series, namely, to present studies that progressively work toward and provide us with an "integrated view of the cell. " In this volume, it is the application of a wide range of physiochemical and biochemi cal techniques to the study of membrane lipids and proteins which serves to demonstrate the significant progress that has been made in this field over the past 25 years. From the understanding of simplified artificial systems, it is hoped that it will ultimately be possible to gain a more accurate understanding of natural biological membranes, in all their diversity. This book is an appropriate successor to Volume 13 of the series, which deals with fluorescence studies on biological membranes. Indeed, the present chapter by Lesley Davenport and colleagues was originally due for inclusion in Volume 13, but has been held over for inclusion in this volume, where it integrates remarkably well with the other topics. The extremely varied and interesting contents of this volume are now briefly outlined. In Chapter I, Jacqueline A. Reynolds and Darrell R. McCaslin pres ent a pertinent survey of the interaction of detergents with membrane lipids and proteins, together with an assessment of the reconstitution process.

Artificial and Reconstituted Membrane Systems

Transport Across Multi-Membrane Systems

The contributions of this volume are concerned with transport phenomena in multimembrane systems and in simple epithelia. In addition to the very substan tial progress that has been made in the area of transport of fluid and solutes across artifical model membranes in vitro and across simple symmetrical cell membranes, much has been learned from studies of transport phenomena in multi membrane systems of higher complexity to be reviewed in this volume. It should be recalled that many of the fundamental conceptual and methodological problems of transport physiology have been successfully approached and defin ed by studying simple epithelia in vitro, and that the direction that research has taken has been affected in a major way by the cellular transport models that have evolved from this approach. Since then striking progress has been made in several areas. Not only have we been witnessing a keen and productive interest in the realtionship between fine structure and transport behavior in multimem brane systems but significant advancements have also been made in defining individual active and passive transport operations, in analysing cell ion activities and transport pools, and in describing the differences in transport functions that underly the membrane asymmetry and cell polarization of cells subserving di rectional transport.