Abstract
Abstract It has recently been shown that cholesterol and sulfatides plays important role in cell membrane status and CTX-A3 interactions. In order to understand the relationship between cholesterol, model membrane and CTX-A3, we employed atomic force microscopy to study cholesterol and model membrane relationship first. We also applied confocal microscope to study the interaction between CTX-A3 and model membrane. Our results suggest that cholesterol decrease the height of sulfatide domains on model membrane, also decrease the average membrane thickness of Sulfatide- POPC membrane. We also found CTX-A3 interacts with sulfatide domains. According to statistic results of AFM images, we found the initial interaction of CTX-A3 and sulfatide-POPC membrane might happen at the edge of sulfatide domains. Which means CTX-A3 might attach to the edge of sulfatide domain, and then CTX-A3 could disturb the dynamics of the edge lipids. Finally CTX-A3 could interact with other CTX-A3 to form complex or insert to membrane to induce following changes. This confirms our labs model again and gives us more understanding of that how CTX-A3 could interact with cell membranes.