Pictures of the Substructure of Liquid-Ordered Domains

Abstract

The coexistence of immiscible liquid bilayer domains is thought by many researchers to be a key property of animal cell plasma membranes (1), and possibly a wider range of membrane types. The study reported in this issue of Biophysical Journal by Sodt et al. (2) provides a detailed picture of these coexisting domains in three different ternary mixtures, including a rather good mimic for the animal cell plasma membrane outer leaflet. As these authors speculate, the details of domain structure might have predictive value for partitioning of membrane proteins between different types of domains.