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Department of Biochemistry, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8N 3Z5, Canada
Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Richard M. Epand, Dept. of Biochemistry, McMaster University Health Sciences Centre, Hamilton, ON L8N 3Z5, Canada. Tel.: 905-525-9140 ext. 22073; Fax: 905-521-1397; E-mail: epand{at}mcmaster.ca.
| ABSTRACT |
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| INTRODUCTION |
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There are other differences in the properties of SM and HSM. HSM has a higher phase transition temperature than SM (Borchman et al., 1996
; Kuikka et al., 2001
), and it is more resistant to partitioning into detergent (Ollila and Slotte, 2002
). Monolayers of HSM undergo an expanded to condensed phase transition at lower surface pressures than SM (Kuikka et al., 2001
). It is also suggested that HSM forms stronger intermolecular H-bonds than SM and that water molecules are an integral part of the H-bonding network in the interfacial region of HSM (Ferguson-Yankey et al., 2000
; Talbott et al., 2000
). This is also in accord with the finding that calcium induces a greater dehydration of SM than of HSM, resulting in increased intermolecular interactions (Rujoi et al., 2002
).
Cholesterol formed more condensed domains with HSM than with SM (Kuikka et al., 2001
). Cholesterol also had a slower rate of desorption from HSM to cyclodextrin than from SM (Kuikka et al., 2001
). These findings suggest that cholesterol interacts more favorably with HSM than with SM. In the present work we study the properties of mixtures of cholesterol with SM and HSM at high mol fractions of cholesterol, comparable to those found in the lens of the eye. We have used SM from egg and HSM that was prepared by hydrogenation of this SM. Palmitate is the most prevalent acyl group in egg SM (Karlsson et al., 1998
). Palmitate is also the most abundant acyl component of both SM (30.6%) and HSM (41.6%) in the porcine lens (Byrdwell, 1998
).
Clusters of cholesterol appear in monolayers and vesicles of SM at mol fractions above 0.67, higher than the 0.5 mol fraction of cholesterol required for cluster formation with phosphatidylcholine (Bittman et al., 1994
; Slotte, 1992
). The clustering of cholesterol will lead to the formation of cholesterol crystallites. We have used DSC and 13C CP/MAS NMR (Guo and Hamilton, 1996
, 1993
) to assess the mol fraction of cholesterol in crystalline form. Recently CP/MAS NMR was used to demonstrate the similarity between mixtures of cholesterol with SM and with dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (Guo et al., 2002
).
| EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURES |
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Preparation of hydrated mixtures of SM or HSM and cholesterol
SM or HSM and cholesterol were codissolved in chloroform/methanol (2:1, v/v). The solvent was evaporated under a stream of nitrogen with constant rotation of a test tube so as to deposit a uniform film of lipid over the bottom third of the tube. Last traces of solvent were removed by placing the tube under high vacuum for at least two hours. The lipid film was then hydrated with 20 mM PIPES, 1 mM EDTA, 150 mM NaCl with 0.002% NaN3, pH 7.40. The lipid film was suspended and hydrated by intermittent vortexing and heating to 60°C over a period of 30 min under argon.
Differential scanning calorimetry
Measurements were made using an N-DSC II calorimeter (Calorimetry Sciences, American Fork, UT). Unless otherwise stated, the scan rate was 2 K/min and there was a delay of 5 min between sequential scans in a series to allow for thermal equilibration. DSC curves were analyzed by using the fitting program, DA-2, provided by Microcal (Northampton, MA) and plotted with Origin, version 5.0.
13C CP/MAS NMR
Lipid suspensions in buffer were spun in an Eppendorf centrifuge at room temperature. The resulting hydrated pellet was transferred to an 18 x 4 mm ZrO2 rotor, attempting to pack the maximal amount of lipid into the rotor while maintaining it wet. There was always some excess buffer present in these samples so that they, like the lipid samples used for DSC, are suspended in excess water. The sample was maintained at room temperature for 24 h to ensure conversion of any anhydrous cholesterol crystals to the monohydrate form.
The rotor was placed in a Bruker AVANCE 300 spectrometer operating at 75.48 MHz for 13C and equipped with CP-MAS capabilities. The spectra were referenced to an external standard of glycine crystals, assigning a chemical shift of 176.14 ppm for the carbonyl carbon. Samples were generally spun at 5 kHz and at a temperature of 25°C, but spinning at rates between 2 and 10 kHz had little effect on the spectrum, except for some changes in the resolution. The power levels used for cross-polarization were not ramped during the contact and corresponded to a 4 µs
/2 pulse. The Hartmann-Hahn match was established on the sample of glycine. Continuous-wave decoupling at an increased power level was used during acquisition. Some experiments were repeated to verify the stability and reproducibility of the cross-polarization.
The temperature inside the rotor, controlled by the variable temperature unit of the instrument, was calibrated by measuring the chemical shift of ethylene glycol as a function of spinning speed between 0 and 10 kHz. At 5 kHz the temperature of the sample was
1 degree warmer than the set temperature. Contact times between 0.02 and 4 ms were used with a recycle time of 5 s. Generally each spectrum was obtained with 12,000 scans and processed with a 1 Hz line broadening. Resonances were assigned based on reports of cholesterol (Guo and Hamilton, 1996
) and SM (Bruzik et al., 1990b
; Guo et al., 2002
).
| RESULTS |
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phase at this temperature and HSM is in the mixed phase region. Dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine, with a comparable phase transition temperature, shows essentially no intensity for this peak in the L
phase and even in the Pß' phase, the intensity of this peak is very weak in CP/MAS (Bruzik et al., 1990a
A detailed NMR study of the properties of bovine brain SM as a function of temperature and mol fraction of cholesterol up to 0.6 has recently been published (Guo et al., 2002
). The present work shows that there is a consistent and significant difference in the chemical shift of the carbonyl group of
0.4 to 0.5 ppm between HSM and SM, either in pure form or in a 1:1 mixture with cholesterol (Table 2). Our values for SM are in very good agreement with those reported by Guo et al. using bovine brain SM (Guo et al., 2002
). The chemical shifts we report are
0.2 ppm higher, which may reflect the lower degree of acyl chain unsaturation of the egg SM used in the present work. The chemical shift of the carbonyl group is a measure of the degree of hydrogen bonding, with anhydrous lipid monomers having resonances at particularly low chemical shifts (Schmidt et al., 1977
). For example, the chemical shift of anhydrous SM in solid form is 173.75 ppm (Bruzik et al., 1990b
), lower than any of the values we report for our hydrated samples. The effect of temperature is relatively small, but cholesterol has a greater effect in increasing the chemical shift. Our results demonstrate that HSM forms stronger hydrogen bonds than SM in agreement with previous NMR studies using different criteria (Ferguson-Yankey et al., 2000
; Talbott et al., 2000
).
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38°C in the first cooling scan (scan 2), whereas the reversal of the polymorphic transition of anhydrous cholesterol crystals exhibits hysteresis (Epand et al., 2000
22°C on cooling in these samples. In subsequent heating scans (scans 3 and 5) as well as cooling scans (scans 4 and 6), only the polymorphic transition of cholesterol is observed. There are qualitative differences between samples with cholesterol and SM and those with cholesterol and HSM. To illustrate this, for simplicity we show only the first heating scan for a series of samples with increasing mol fractions of cholesterol (Fig. 4). It is clear that SM has more cholesterol monohydrate crystals. The lower amount of cholesterol monohydrate in the samples with HSM is not a consequence of insufficient water being present, as there is a huge excess of water, but rather because of a kinetic barrier to hydration. In quantifying the amount of anhydrous cholesterol, for mixtures with SM, the enthalpy of the transition in the cooling scans at
20°C was used to avoid overlap with any residual transition from the phospholipid (Table 3). For samples at 0.6 or 0.7 mol fraction of cholesterol, the magnitude of this peak decreased to some extent in each subsequent scan. This is noted in Table 3 for the cases in which this decrease was relatively large. We believe this is a consequence of the sample coming to equilibrium from the state that is initially formed on hydration. It has been suggested that some cholesterol may separate during preparation of the lipid film by solvent evaporation (Buboltz and Feigenson, 1999
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38°C, overlapping the polymorphic transition of anhydrous cholesterol. However, the enthalpy of the residual SM transition is small. There is also some residual HSM appearing at 44.5°C in scans with this lipid. In addition, there is clearly more cholesterol monohydrate in the samples with SM than those with HSM. The calculated enthalpy values for the peak at 94°C and its low temperature shoulder are summarized in Table 4. In addition, the dehydration of cholesterol monohydrate at the commonly observed temperature of
80°C can be clearly identified in the scan with SM after 24 h, but not in the 24-hour scan with HSM. At longer times of incubation it is difficult to distinguish between a transition at
80°C and a low temperature shoulder of the 94°C transition. The shift of the dehydration transition to higher temperatures demonstrates that there is some interaction of the cholesterol crystals with the membrane since pure crystals of cholesterol monohydrate undergo transformation to the anhydrous form at
80°C.
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| DISCUSSION |
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A shift of the temperature of dehydration of cholesterol monohydrate to exhibit a sharp transition at
95°C has been previously observed. It does not occur with pure cholesterol monohydrate crystals and is evidence for the crystallites being in close contact with the phospholipid. The phenomenon has been found to occur in the presence of the protein NAP-22 (Epand et al., 2001b
) and also after incubation of mixtures of phosphatidylserine and cholesterol for many hours (Epand et al., 2001a
). In the case of SM mixtures with cholesterol, this shift is observed in freshly prepared samples (Figs. 3 and 4). With phosphatidylserine (Epand et al., 2001a
), as with fresh samples of sphingomyelin (Table 3), the amount of cholesterol monohydrate undergoing dehydration at this temperature decreased between 0.6 and 0.7 mol fraction cholesterol. It also has been observed with phosphatidylserine that the amount of cholesterol monohydrate crystals formed decreases with higher mol fractions of cholesterol (Epand et al., 2001a
). The molar enthalpy for the dehydration of cholesterol is 2.35 kcal/mol (Loomis et al., 1979
), and there is evidence that this enthalpy is unchanged when the dehydration transition temperature is shifted to higher values (Epand et al., 2002
). Therefore, at a cholesterol mol fraction of 0.7,
35% of the cholesterol is in the form of cholesterol monohydrate crystals after prolonged incubation for both SM and HSM (Table 4).
Cholesterol is more soluble in SM or HSM than in many other phospholipids (Bach and Wachtel, 2003
). Only at mol fractions of 0.7 and 0.8 are substantial amounts of anhydrous cholesterol crystals found (Table 3). At a cholesterol mol fraction of 0.5 there is no cholesterol present that is phase separated as crystals. This is true both for anhydrous cholesterol crystals that would be observed by DSC in fresh samples as well as cholesterol monohydrate crystals that could have been observed in the incubated samples used for CP/MAS. This agrees with the results of Hamilton and co-workers who showed by different criteria that cholesterol was miscible with SM up to a mol fraction of 0.5 (Guo et al., 2002
). At 0.6 mol fraction of cholesterol, the final amount of anhydrous cholesterol crystals present after heating and cooling is only 1% and 3% of the total cholesterol for SM and HSM, respectively. Even at the high cholesterol mol fraction of 0.7, only 9% of the cholesterol is present as anhydrous crystals with SM. There is only one biological membrane in which such high cholesterol mol fractions are found; that is the membranes of the lens of the eye of mammals. SM and HSM are major phospholipid components of the mammalian lens membrane. HSM is particularly abundant in the lens of the human eye. This study shows that cholesterol crystals can form in lipid mixtures of the major lipid components of lens membranes. Cholesterol crystals have been found in plasma membranes isolated from the lens of the eye (Jacob et al., 1999
, 2001
), and these crystals may play a functional role in the normal lens (Mason et al., 2003
) as well as being associated with certain pathological conditions. The appearance of these crystals can be explained simply on the basis of the nature of the lipids in this membrane.
| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS |
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This work was supported by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (MT-7654). Richard M. Epand is a Senior Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
| FOOTNOTES |
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Submitted on October 25, 2002; accepted for publication January 3, 2003.
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