Home CUSTOMERS General Physiology and Biophysics 2020 General Physiology and Biophysics Vol.39, No.2, 135–144, 2020

Journal info


Quarterly, 80 pp. per issue
Founded: 1982
ISSN  1338-4325 (online)

Published in English

Aims and Scope
Editorial Info
Abstracting and Indexing
Submission Guidelines

Select Journal







Webshop Cart

Your Cart is currently empty.
Info: Your browser does not accept cookies. To put products into your cart and purchase them you need to enable cookies.

General Physiology and Biophysics Vol.39, No.2, 135–144, 2020

Title: Structural changes introduced by cholesterol and melatonin to the model membranes mimicking preclinical conformational diseases
Author: Tatiana Murugova, Oleksandr Ivankov, Elena Ermakova, Tomáš Kondela, Pavol Hrubovčák, Vadim Skoi, Alexander Kuklin, Norbert Kučerka
Abstract: The structure and dynamics of membranes depend on many external and internal factors that in turn determine their biological functions. One of the widely accepted and studied characteristics of biomembranes is their fluidity. We research a simple system with variable fluidity tweakable via its composition. The addition of cholesterol is employed to increase the order of lipid chains, thus decreasing the membrane fluidity, while melatonin is shown to elevate the chain disorder, thus also the membrane fluidity. We utilize the densitometric measurements to show a shift of studied systems closer or further from the gel-to-fluid phase transition. The structural changes represented by changes to membrane thickness are evaluated from small angle neutron scattering. Finally, we look at the ability of the two additives to control the interactions between membrane and amyloid-beta peptides. Our results suggest that fluidizing effect of melatonin can promote an insertion of peptide within the membrane interior. Intriguingly, the latter structure relates possibly to an Alzheimer’s disease preventing mechanism postulated in the case of melatonin.
Keywords: Membrane fluidity — Cholesterol — Melatonin — Amyloid-beta peptide — Neutron scattering
Published online: 26-Mar-2020
Year: 2020, Volume: 67, Issue: 2 Page From: 135, Page To: 144
doi:10.4149/gpb_2019054


download file


© AEPress s.r.o
Copyright notice: For any permission to reproduce, archive or otherwise use the documents in the ELiS, please contact AEP.