Transcripts
DR. LINGWOOD:
What I've just said is
schematically shown here. We have the sugar
sequence of Gb3 here. This would be the
membrane of the cell, and we call this the
primary recognition sequence. This galactose
alpha one-four linked galactose that the toxin
binds to, but there's an interface here.
This is part of the molecule
that likes to be in water, but this is very
hydrotropic, - it will not dissolve in water.
And if you like, there's a strain in the
molecule here between the water soluble part and
the lipid part. And that causes some unusual
effects around this - what's called the anomeric
- oxygen, here.
And we think this interface has
some supramolecular structure involving salvation
of water molecules here and the surrounding
lipids to change, somehow - we don't really know
yet, - but change the ability of a toxin to
recognize this structure.
The hydrophobic lipid is called a liquid crystallin
structure in the membrane.
This, I'm sure, seems very biochemical, but this
actually turns out to be related to exactly how
cells respond when they're exposed to verotoxin.
You may or you may not be used
to seeing a standard presentation of a membrane.
There's a sort of a double line, a bilayer of
lipid which interfaces with water on the outside
of a cell. And that's the way most people in
science think of the membrane.
