Head of the Budin lab at UCSD (www.budinlab.com). Musings on thin layers of grease in our cells (and other topics). Lipids, cell membranes, biophysics, chem bio, evolution. 🏳️🌈
Itay Budin
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This is a fantastic institue and people…what an opportunity!
Lipids come in many chemistries and molecular shapes. Many are non-bilayer in nature - they have an intrinsic curvature that prefers folding up into tubes instead of sheets. Paradoxically, cells need these to for their membranes to pinch and proteins to wiggle. Real cell membranes are quite complex!
Soon to be defending PhD student Daniel Milshteyn showed that they do so, but through different mechanisms. Yeast increase synthesis of PI - a poorly characterized lipid that we show promotes negative curvature - while cancer cells increase ether lipids and long, unsaturated chains.
We asked if cells monitor and maintain this facet of lipid biophysics. To do so, we coupled extreme pressures - which we previously showed drive curvature-driven adaptation in marine animals - with SAXS/spectroscopy and lipidomics to test if "common" cells respond to acute reductions in curvature.
These results suggest that cells are responsive to curvature elastic stress that nonbilayer lipids impose and regulate lipid metabolism accordingly. This is central for everyday metabolic decisions, like which phospholipids to make through competing pathways.
News and views from Olivia Seidel in my lab on this important paper from the Baskin lab from last month www.nature.com/articles/s41...
What membrane properties do cells maintain through regulation of lipid metabolism? In a new paper, we identify intrinsic curvature stress as one such parameter and show how different (eukaryotic) cell types employ different lipids to do that www.cell.com/cell-reports...
New paper where we report that Npc2 - a shuttle-like lipid transfer protein - in yeast directly transports sphingolipids to the = vacuole membrane during formation of microautophagy-linked ordered domains #lipidtime
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Itay Budin
Itay Budin
Itay Budin
Cells maintain membrane function by actively balancing the molecular shape of their
lipids. Milshteyn et al. find that, when subjected to high hydrostatic pressure, yeast
and human cells, but not bact...
The yeast vacuole membrane forms ordered microdomains that facilitate microlipophagy under nutrient limitation. We previously found that this process …
