High Pressure NMR Studies on Lyotropic Lipid Mesophases and Model Biomembranes

Abstract

For about 15 years now, high pressure NMR techniques have been used to study the structure, dynamics and phase behaviour of biomolecular systems. After a brief introduction discussing the important reasons for using high pressure as an experimental variable in studies of volume effects in biochemical systems, a section on instrumentation follows which deals with high resolution, high pressure NMR probes. In the main part, various high pressure NMR experiments on model biomembrane systems consisting of pure phospholipid bilayers and of lipid bilayers with additives, such as cholesterol, anaesthetics and polypeptides, are reviewed and discussed.