Abstract
The microstructure of cell membrane features lipid rafts, the liquid-ordered dynamic nanodomains, embedded in liquid-disordered matrices. Lipid rafts play an important role in transmembrane signal
transduction, membrane trafficking, and viral budding. However, how the cell regulates the size, lifetime, and spatial localization of lipid rafts is still unclear. Over the years, experimental studies of lipid raft have lead to several phenomenological theories accounting for its formation. I investigated these theories by the continuum model and found that they can be differentiated by a combination of the spatial correlation and temporal fluctuation spectra of rafts.
This result points the direction for the designing of experiments that will eventually lead to the correct paradigm of how cell regulates the microstructure of cell membranes.
Biography
Dr. Jun Fan currently is a postdoctoral scholar with Prof. Gregory Voth at the Center for Multiscale Theory and Simulation at the University of Chicago. She received her bachelor degree in Materials Science and Engineering in 2003 from Tsinghua University, China. She then went to McMaster University in Canada, where she worked with
Prof. Nicolas Provatas on phase transitions and transformations of
alloys and got a master’s degree in Materials Science in 2005.
Afterwards, she continued her studies in Prof. Mikko Haataja’s group
at Princeton University and received her Ph.D. in Jan. 2011. |
