A Versatile Suspended Lipid Membrane System for Probing Membrane Remodeling and Disruption

• DOI: 10.20944/preprints202209.0119.v1
• Publication Date: 2022-09-09T06:36:47Z
• Authors: Achinta Sannigrahi; Vishwesh Harichar...; Muhsin Vannan Chalil; Debayani Chakraborty; Subrat Kumar Meher; Rahul Roy
• Keywords: Membrane Curvature; Membrane biophysics

Artificial membrane systems can serve as models to investigate molecular mechanisms of different cellular processes, including transport, pore formation, and viral fusion. However, the current simulacrums such SUVs, GUVs, supported lipid bilayers suffer from issues, namely high curvature, heterogeneity, surface artefacts, respectively. Freestanding membranes provide a facile solution these but developed by various groups use silicon or aluminium oxide wafers for fabrication that involves access dedicated nanolithography facility cost while conferring poor stability. Here, we report development, characterization applications an easy-to-fabricate suspended bilayer (SULB) platform leveraging commercial track-etched porous filters (PCTE) with defined microwell size. Our SULB system offers study composition-dependent structural functional properties exceptional stability in throughput fashion. With dye entrapped PCTE microwells SULB, show sphingomyelin significantly augments activity pore-forming toxin, Cytolysin A (ClyA) formation induces exchange between leaflets. Further, demonstrate efficiency rapid kinetics fusion dengue virus our platform. mimetic novel large class biomembrane interactions processes.