@KayTrue (Sarah L. Keller)
@kaytrue.bsky.social
Scientist at UW-Seattle. Excited about membrane biophysics and increasing access to STEM. Opinions my own.
This week, Sarah and I were reflecting how all those years ago, when we were a new PhD student and a new faculty member, we had no idea that our data would be quantitatively relevant and actively used decades later by this awesome community. It’s humbling. www.biophysics.org/blog/a-17-ye...
A 17-Year-Old BJ Article Explored the Ground Rules of Phase Separation in Lipid Bilayer
For Biophysics Week, members of the Publications Committee selected a few influential articles from Biophysical Journal to highlight as well as the people who wrote them. This is the first in the seri...
www.biophysics.org
November 7, 2025 at 6:16 AM
This week, Sarah and I were reflecting how all those years ago, when we were a new PhD student and a new faculty member, we had no idea that our data would be quantitatively relevant and actively used decades later by this awesome community. It’s humbling. www.biophysics.org/blog/a-17-ye...
Sarah recently had a similar pleasant surprise in using data from her same 2003 paper to quantitatively analyze a prewetting transition in her new article with three other awesome colleagues: Yousef Bhagheri, Mason Rouches, and Ben Machta (also not on bsky?) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org
November 7, 2025 at 6:16 AM
Sarah recently had a similar pleasant surprise in using data from her same 2003 paper to quantitatively analyze a prewetting transition in her new article with three other awesome colleagues: Yousef Bhagheri, Mason Rouches, and Ben Machta (also not on bsky?) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
It was really a joy to see how the new data from Fred’s lab for PC-lipids fall on top of Sarah's 20+ year old data, whether the lipids are mixed at 1:1:1 (thin black outline) or 2:2:1 (thick black outline)! All our labs are so much better at making vesicles now, yet the old data hold up very well!
November 7, 2025 at 6:16 AM
It was really a joy to see how the new data from Fred’s lab for PC-lipids fall on top of Sarah's 20+ year old data, whether the lipids are mixed at 1:1:1 (thin black outline) or 2:2:1 (thick black outline)! All our labs are so much better at making vesicles now, yet the old data hold up very well!
Even longer ago, awesome colleague @veatchlab.bsky.social found a linear relationship between the liquid-liquid phase transition temperature of ternary membranes containing PC-lipids and the melting temperature of high-Tmelt PC-lipids in those membranes. www.cell.com/biophysj/ful...
Separation of Liquid Phases in Giant Vesicles of Ternary Mixtures of Phospholipids and Cholesterol
We use fluorescence microscopy to directly observe liquid phases in giant unilamellar
vesicles. We find that a long list of ternary mixtures of high melting temperature
(saturated) lipids, low melting...
www.cell.com
November 7, 2025 at 6:16 AM
Even longer ago, awesome colleague @veatchlab.bsky.social found a linear relationship between the liquid-liquid phase transition temperature of ternary membranes containing PC-lipids and the melting temperature of high-Tmelt PC-lipids in those membranes. www.cell.com/biophysj/ful...
Awesome colleagues Ana García-Sáez, Salvatore Chiantia & Petra Schwille (not on bsky) have also tracked changes in Tmix for a series of ternary membranes in which they changed only one of the three lipids. In their case, they changed the low-Tmelt (unsaturated) PC-lipid.
www.jbc.org/article/S002...
www.jbc.org/article/S002...
Effect of Line Tension on the Lateral Organization of Lipid Membranes *
The principles of organization and functioning of cellular membranes are currently
not well understood. The raft hypothesis suggests the existence of domains or rafts
in cell membranes, which behave a...
www.jbc.org
November 7, 2025 at 6:16 AM
Awesome colleagues Ana García-Sáez, Salvatore Chiantia & Petra Schwille (not on bsky) have also tracked changes in Tmix for a series of ternary membranes in which they changed only one of the three lipids. In their case, they changed the low-Tmelt (unsaturated) PC-lipid.
www.jbc.org/article/S002...
www.jbc.org/article/S002...
Two of the high-Tmelt lipids that they used were asymmetric: (14:0-18:0)PC and its opposite, (18:0-14:0)PC. They found an interesting and perplexing result that the order of the chains on the lipid backbone matters! Vesicles with (18:0-14:0)PC had an anomalously low Tmix transition temperature.
November 7, 2025 at 6:16 AM
Two of the high-Tmelt lipids that they used were asymmetric: (14:0-18:0)PC and its opposite, (18:0-14:0)PC. They found an interesting and perplexing result that the order of the chains on the lipid backbone matters! Vesicles with (18:0-14:0)PC had an anomalously low Tmix transition temperature.