Black cones show water molecules being oriented in the electric field at the interface with the lipid. Credit: Carlos Marques, ENS Lyon
A Franco-German research team, headed by Dr. Carlos Marques from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, and Prof. Dr. Jan Behrends from the Institute of Physiology at the, has recently collected data that casts fundamental doubt on what has been accepted for decades as the standard model of this mechanism.
With the help of this device, it was now possible for the doctoral candidate Eulalie Lafarge from the Charles Sadron Institute at the University of Strasbourg and Dr. Ekaterina Zaitseva from the Freiburg research group to generate hundreds of membranes in a relatively short time and to measure and quantify pore formation as a function of the strength of the direct current field.