X-ray diffraction studies of oriented lipid bilayers

Abstract

This brief review of the X-ray diffraction technique used to study oriented lipid bilayer systems is primarily intended to demonstrate to the nonspecialist in the lipid field the amount of detailed information that can be obtained simply by visually inspecting the diffraction pattern and making some measurements with a rule and protractor. The information that can be extracted from X-ray diffraction data is illustrated by selected examples of our most recent work.

Stalk formation as a function of lipid composition studied by X-ray reflectivity

“…X-ray and neutron diffraction have since long been employed in the study of model lipid membranes, yielding high-resolution (down to Å scale) structural details [18,39,51,23,40]. Recently, we have provided a high resolution X-ray analysis of the stalk structure in several different lipid membrane systems [3], using the approach of equilibrium stalk phases, as introduced by the seminal work of Yang and Huang [59].…”

Structural Characterization of an Archaeal Lipid Bilayer as a Function of Hydration and Temperature

“…The sum of the neutron scattering lengths per unit volume is known as a neutron scattering length density profile. The NSLD profile was calculated as a discrete set of Fourier coefficients f n according to the formula [30]:…”

Non-equilibrium dynamics of lipid bilayers

“…For a multilamellar lipid stack the relative vertical electron density prole ∆ρ(z) can be reconstructed from the integrated Bragg peak intensities I(0, q z (n)) and the corresponding positions q z (n) as obtained from a standard reectivity measurement by the well known Fourier synthesis approach [94,95].…”

“…(q z (n)) denotes the Lorentz-, polarization-and illumination corrected integrated intensity (see e.g. [95]) of the n'th order Bragg reection. The initially unknown relative phase factors ν n ∈ [−1, +1] can be reconstructed by e.g.…”