Towards a Supported Mammalian Membrane Mimic – Evaluating Membrane Composition of Raft Forming Bilayers Using Selective Deuteration

'Raft' forming bilayers containing cholesterol are of interest as models for mammalian cell membranes. We have been studying the so called 'canonical raft mixture', which is a ternary mixture of POPC/Sphingomyelin/Cholesterol as floating bilayers formed by Langmuir Blodgett/Schaeffer transfer from monolayers. We have confirmed that we are able to form high coverage bilayers by NR, and that these show the expected phase separation by fluorescence microscopy. What is still unknown however is how well the initial composition of the monolayer is reflected in the final system i.e. whether all three components transfer equally. We propose to use selective deuteration to answer this question, by gradually increasing the level of deuteration in some of the components, and examining whether the SLD of the final films match their expected values.