Scientists Develop New Tool for the Study of Spatial Patterns in Living Cells
Football has often been called “a game of inches,” but biology is a game of nanometers, where spatial differences of only a few nanometers can determine the fate of a cell - whether it lives or dies, remains normal or turns cancerous. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a new and better way to study the impact of spatial patterns on living cells.
Berkeley Lab chemist Jay Groves led a study in which artificial membranes made up of a fluid bilayer of lipid molecules were embedded with fixed arrays of gold nanoparticles to control the spacing of proteins and other cellular molecules placed on the membranes. This provided the researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to study how the spatial patterns of chemical and physical properties on membrane surfaces influence the behavior of cells.
“The gold nanoparticles are similar to the size of a single protein molecule, which gets us to a scale we couldn’t really access before,” says Groves. “As the first example of a biological membrane platform that combines fixed nanopatterning with the mobility of fluid lipid bilayers, our technique represents an important improvement over previous patterning methods.”