Université de Fribourg

Conserved functions of ether lipids and sphingolipids in the early secretory pathway

Jiménez-Rojo, Noemi ; Leonetti, Manuel D. ; Zoni, Valeria ; Colom, Adai ; Feng, Suihan ; Iyengar, Namrata R. ; Matile, Stefan ; Roux, Aurélien ; Vanni, Stefano ; Weissman, Jonathan S. ; Riezman, Howard

In: Current Biology, 2020, vol. 30, no. 19, p. 3775-3787.e7

Sphingolipids play important roles in physiology and cell biology, but a systematic examination of their functions is lacking. We performed a genome-wide CRISPRi screen in sphingolipid-depleted human cells and identified hypersensitive mutants in genes of membrane trafficking and lipid biosynthesis, including ether lipid synthesis. Systematic lipidomic analysis showed a coordinate regulation...

Université de Fribourg

Correlation of surface pressure and hue of planarizable push-pull chromophores at the air/water interface

Neuhaus, Frederik ; Zobi, Fabio ; Brezesinski, Gerald ; Molin, Marta Dal ; Matile, Stefan ; Zumbuehl, Andreas

In: Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, 2017, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 1099–1105

It is currently not possible to directly measure the lateral pressure of a biomembrane. Mechanoresponsive fluorescent probes are an elegant solution to this problem but it requires first the establishment of a direct correlation between the membrane surface pressure and the induced color change of the probe. Here, we analyze planarizable dithienothiophene push–pull probes in a monolayer at...