Significance of Lipids in

Biological membranes
and transport
mechanisms
Rabbiya Farooq
BCH 181004
BS Chemistry 4B
 Significance of liquids in biological membranes and transport mechanism.
What are Biological Membranes?
Biological membranes are present inn living organisms and they act as a selectively permeable
barrier allowing few molecules to pass through while hindering the flow of others e.g. the plasma
membranes that surround the eukaryotic cell.
Plasma membrane:
It is present outside the animal cell and beneath the cell wall in plant cell and act as a semi
permeable barrier allowing only selective molecules to pass through.
Selective permeability of plasma membrane:
Probably the most important feature of a biomembrane is that it is a selectively permeable
structure. This means that the size, charge, and other chemical properties of the atoms and
molecules attempting to cross it will determine whether they succeed in doing so.
Structure:
The structure of membrane is described by the fluid mosaic model. It was first proposed
by S.J. Singer and Garth L. Nicolson in 1972 to explain the structure of the plasma membrane.

Composition of plasma membrane:

Plasma membrane is made up of Carbohydrate Polymers, some intrinsic proteins as channel
Proteins Other Transport Proteins as Carrier Proteins, Enzymes and Coenzymes and
Steroid Molecule as Cholesterol. The three major classes of membrane lipids are
phospholipids, glycolipids and Cholestrol.
Phospholipids:
It forms a phospholipid bilayer and is the main fabric of membrane.
Cholestrol:
It is present on and in between the phospholipid bilayer
Integral Proteins:
They are embedded within the phospholipid bilayer.
Peripheral proteins:
They are present on the inner or outer surface of bilayer.
Carbohydrate:
They are attached to the proteins on lipid bilayer.

Significance of lipids in biological membrane:

Biological membranes are fluid (liquid–crystalline) lipid bilayers, into which, proteins can insert
or associate at the surface.
Phospholipid bilayer is the main part of a biological membrane which gives it the structure and
also maintains the fluidity of cell. A typical phospholipid bilayer is as follows:
The matrix that defines a biological membrane is a lipid bilayer composed of a hydrophobic core
excluded from water and an ionic surface that interacts with water and defines the hydrophobic-
hydrophilic interface.
The biological membranes are made up of lipids which have:
1. hydrophobic tail:

The hydrophobic tails are hydrocarbon tails whose length and saturation is important in
characterizing the cell.
The tail (composed of the fatty acids) has no charge.
2. hydrophilic heads:

The main fabric of the membrane is composed of amphiphilic or dual-loving,

phospholipid molecules. The hydrophilic or water-loving areas of these molecules are in
contact with the aqueous fluid both inside and outside the cell.
The head (the phosphate-containing group) has a polar character or negative charge.
Lipid rafts occur when lipid species and proteins aggregate in domains in the membrane. These
help organize membrane components into localized areas that are involved in specific processes,
such as signal transduction.
The typical structure of a phospholipid is as follows:

Functions of Lipids in membrane:

 1. By forming a double layer with the polar ends pointing outwards and the nonpolar ends
pointing inwards membrane lipids forms a 'lipid bilayer' which keeps the watery interior
of the cell separate from the watery exterior.
2. The arrangements of lipids and various proteins, acting as receptors and channel pores in
the membrane, control the entry and exit of other molecules and ions as part of the cell's
metabolism.
3. In order to perform physiological functions, membrane proteins are facilitated to rotate
and diffuse laterally in two dimensional expanse of lipid bilayer by the presence of a shell
of lipids closely attached to protein surface.

Transport Mechanisms across the membrane

All cells need to acquire the molecules and ions that they need from their surrounding
extracellular fluid. There is exchange of molecules and ions in and out of the cell wall, as well as
in and out of membrane-bounded intracellular organelles. There are 2 types of Transport
mechanism across the cell membrane the active transport and the passive transport.

The following diagram depicts the active and passive transport:

Movement of liquids across the membrane takes place by different processes. Take an example
of water.
Movement of water:
Water passes through the lipid bilayer by diffusion and by osmosis, but most of it moves
through special protein channels called aquaporins.
Water can diffuse through the lipid bilayer even though it's polar because it's a very small
molecule.
Water can also pass through the cell membrane by osmosis, because of the high osmotic
pressure difference between the inside and the outside the cell.
That doesn't mean that it's an easy process, because the solubility of water in lipid is about 1
molecule of water per million molecules of lipid.
But the outside concentration of water is very high (about 50 mol/L), and the surface area to
volume ratio of the cell is very large, so this is an important cellular process.
Active Transport:
The movement of ions or molecules across a cell membrane into a region of higher
concentration, assisted by enzymes and requiring energy.

Example:
The sodium-potassium pump, an important pump in animal cells, expends energy in the form of
ATP to move potassium ions into the cell and a different number of sodium ions out of the cell.
The action of this pump results in a concentration and charge difference across the membrane.

The process of moving sodium and potassium ions across the cell membrane is an active
transport process involving the hydrolysis of ATP to provide the necessary energy. It involves an
enzyme referred to as Na+/K+-ATPase. This process is responsible for maintaining the large
excess of Na+ outside the cell and the large excess of K+ ions on the inside.

Passive Transport:
Passive transport is the movement of molecules across the membrane without the expenditure
of energy. It is of following types:
Diffusion:
It is the movement of a substance from an area of high concentration to an area of low
concentration.
Simple passive diffusion occurs when small molecules pass through the lipid bilayer of a cell
membrane whereas Facilitated diffusion depends on carrier proteins imbedded in the
membrane to allow specific substances to pass through, that might not be able to diffuse
through the cell membrane.
An example is the movement of oxygen across the membrane. The oxygen molecules simply
move directly through a membrane in response to the high-to-low concentration gradient. It
diffuses out of the lungs and into the blood for transport to all of the cells.

Facilitated Diffusion:

Facilitated diffusion is a form of facilitated transport involving the passive movement of

molecules along their concentration gradient, guided by the presence of another molecule –
usually an integral membrane protein forming a pore or channel.
Facilitated diffusion is different from simple diffusion in several ways.

1. The transport relies on molecular binding between the cargo and the membrane-
embedded channel or carrier protein.
 2. The rate of facilitated diffusion is saturable with respect to the concentration difference
between the two phases; unlike free diffusion which is linear in the concentration
difference.
3. The temperature dependence of facilitated transport is substantially different due to the
presence of an activated binding event, as compared to free diffusion where the
dependence on temperature is mild.

Osmosis:
Osmosis is a process by which molecules of a solvent tend to pass through a semipermeable
membrane from a less concentrated solution into a more concentrated one.
For example, the movement of water across the membrane.
Ion channels:
Ion channels are protein molecules that span across the cell membrane allowing the passage of
ions from one side of the membrane to the other.