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* Institut Fresnel, Mosaic Group, Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille III, Domaine Universitaire de Saint Jérôme, Marseille Cedex, France;
CNRS UMR 6133, Marseille, France;
Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille Luminy, Université de la Méditerranée, Parc Scientifique de Luminy, Case 906, Marseille Cedex, France;
CNRS UMR 6102, Marseille, France; ¶ INSERM UMR 631, Marseille, France; || ISIS, Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France; and ** CNRS UMR 7006, Strasbourg, France
Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Pierre-François Lenne, Institut Fresnel, Domaine Universitaire de Saint Jérôme, 13397 Marseille Cedex 20, France. Tel.: 33-491-288-494; Fax: 33-491-288-067; E-mail: lenne{at}fresnel.fr, jerome.wenger{at}fresnel.fr.
| ABSTRACT |
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| INTRODUCTION |
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1030 nm (7
300 nm set by the diffraction of light. This drawback can be overcome by using nanometric apertures milled in a metallic film (12
In this study, we describe the development of a methodology to probe the ultrafine organization of living cell membranes by combining FCS with single nanometric apertures of different sizes. The main innovation is that our strategy allows us to identify the mechanism controlling the diffusion of the different molecular components and also provides an estimate for the characteristic size of the nanometric membrane heterostructures. This yields a technique having both high spatial and temporal resolution together with a direct statistical analysis. Living cells with fluorescently labeled membrane components (lipid analogs and green fluorescent protein (GFP)-tagged proteins) are incubated over isolated nanoapertures milled in a metallic film with radii between 75 and 250 nm. The single apertures act as pinholes directly located under the cell membrane and restrict the observation area below the diffraction limit (this is illustrated in Fig. 1). Performing FCS experiments with increasing aperture sizes, we clearly demonstrate that transient regimes are observed when the probed area is close to the size of the confining structures, revealing nanometric membrane heterogeneities. Based on numerical simulations and previous theoretical work (15
), we identify the mechanism controlling the diffusion and give an estimate of the characteristic size of the heterogeneities. To validate the method, we compare the diffusion behaviors of different membrane components. For every molecule that we probed, the data obtained within larger nanoholes agrees well with the results using diffraction-limited spots and extensive drug treatments (16
). This further rules out the possibility that the observed regimes are artifactual.
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| MATERIALS AND METHODS |
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Cell culture over nanoapertures
Optically opaque aluminum films (thickness 220 nm) were deposited on standard microscope glass coverslips (thickness 150 µm). Focused ion beam technique (FIB) was then used to mill circular nanometric apertures with radii ranging from 75 to 250 nm. The samples were washed for 3 min in an ultrasonic cleaner before rinsing with diluted ethanol (70°) and evaporation of the alcohol residue. We placed a drop of culture medium containing trypsinized COS-7 (ATCC, CRL-1657) cells 40 h before the FCS experiments, to allow cell-substrate adhesion. Cells adhered to the metal surface and conformed to nanoapertures spontaneously.
Fluorescent staining with lipid analogs
Phosphatidylcholine (PC) and ganglioside (GM1) lipids were labeled with the 4,4-difluoro-5,7-dimethyl-4-bora-3a,4a-diaza-s-indacene (BODIPY) fluorophore (Molecular Probes, Leiden, The Netherlands). Equimolar complexes of 0.05 µM BODIPY phosphatidylcholine PC (FL-PC) or BODIPY ganglioside GM1 (FL-GM1) with defatted BSA were prepared in HBSS/HEPES buffer (Hanks' buffered salt solution containing 10 mM HEPES pH 7.4). Cell cultures were washed in HBSS/HEPES, incubated with the 0.05 µM lipid/BSA complex in HBSS/HEPES for 30 min at 20°C, rinsed and incubated subsequently in HBSS/HEPES at 37°C. FL-PC staining was done immediately previous to the FCS measurements and FL-GM1 staining at least 12 h before the measurements.
Cholesterol conversion
To modify the cholesterol composition of the plasma membrane, cells were treated with Streptomyces sp. cholesterol oxidase (COase, Calbiochem) in serum-free HBSS/HEPES buffer, incubated with COase at 1 U/mL for 60 min at 37°C and finally rinsed in HBSS/HEPES buffer. All FCS measurements were completed within 60 min after cellular treatments. In this condition,
20% of the total cell cholesterol was converted into cholestenone (16
). We think that the effect of cholesterol oxidation on raft disorganization originates from a combined effect of cholesterol concentration decrease and production of cholestenone bearing antagonizing action to ordered domains (17
).
FCS apparatus
FCS experiments were performed on a custom setup based on an Axiovert 200M microscope (Zeiss, Jena, Germany) with a Zeiss C-Apochromat 40x, numerical aperture 1.2 objective lens and a three-axis piezo-scanner (Physik Instrument, Karlsruhe, Germany). The laser power was lowered to 2.5 µW to avoid cell damage and dye photobleaching. Fluorescence was collected by the same objective, filtered by a dichroic mirror and a confocal pinhole before detection by two avalanche photodiodes through a 50/50 splitter and 535 ± 20 nm bandpass filters. Cross correlations using a hardware correlator (ALV-GmBH, Langen, Germany) between the two photodiodes was used to reduce artifacts. For each aperture diameter, FCS measurements were performed on a minimum of 6 different cells. Each measurement was obtained from 20 runs of 5 s duration. For experiments with diffraction-limited beams, the observation areas were calibrated using FCS measurements on rhodamine-6G in aqueous solution (the diffusion coefficient was taken as 280 µm2/s). Due to technical concerns with the microscope apparatus at the beginning of this study, FCS measurements on living cells were carried out at 27°C for lipid analogs and at 37°C for GFP-tagged proteins.
Fitting the autocorrelation functions
For free Brownian two-dimensional diffusion in the case of a Gaussian molecular detection efficiency, the fluorescence autocorrelation function (ACF) is given by
![]() | (1) |
d the diffusion time.
d is linked to the laser beam transversal waist w and the molecular diffusion coefficient D by
. In this case,
d also equals the ACF lag time at half-maximum.
For FCS measurements on lipids analogs, a single membrane component fit following Eq. 1 was implemented. Even for the smallest apertures used, this procedure efficiently fitted the experimental data, as shown on Fig. 2. In FCS experiments conducted on the chimeric proteins, two diffusive species were associated to the ACF, as already reported in (16
). The faster component had diffusion times
fast of the order of 0.51 ms (linked to species diffusing in the intracellular pool), whereas the longer component experienced clearly distinct diffusion times
d of
20 ms (two-dimensional diffusion across the membrane). This is taken into account in the ACF numerical fits by introducing a supplementary free variable A to account for the relative weight of the slow (membrane-bound) species:
![]() | (2) |
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75%. It increased to 85% for a 110-nm aperture, and to almost 100% for a 75-nm radius aperture. Thus for these smallest apertures, the diffusion time
d could be simply taken as the ACF lag time at half-maximum. | RESULTS |
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We first examine the diffusion of the fluorescent phosphatidylcholine FL-PC in a COS-7 cell membrane. Fig. 2 A shows two fluorescence ACFs obtained for FL-PC using a 75-nm radius nanohole and a diffraction-limited spot of 240-nm waist. The ACFs were numerically fitted to determine the diffusion time
d (see the Methods section for a description of the fitting procedure). The extracted diffusion times were then plotted against the aperture area and against the laser spot area (as in (15
,16
), this curve is referred to as FCS diffusion law, see Fig. 2 C). Aperture radii varied from 75 to 250 nm in radius, whereas diffraction-limited spot waists were set from 240 to 350 nm by changing the microscope objective's filling factor (15
). Fig. 2 C shows that the diffusion time
d for FL-PC varies almost linearly with the observation area over the whole range being probed. A small slope change may be pointed out around r
125 nm (area
5 x 104 nm2), but this comes close to the sensitivity of our apparatus, and appears a minor discrepancy compared to the transient regimes found for the other membrane components (see the discussion in the Supplementary Material online). Two conclusions can thus be drawn: i), FL-PC diffusion within the membrane is apparently unhindered by the nanoaperture; and ii), the observation volume is set by the aperture area.
Although cells, culture conditions and labeling methods were the same, ganglioside analogs FL-GM1 have a completely different diffusion behavior, as reported in Fig. 2 C. At aperture radii below 100 nm,
d increases almost linearly with the aperture area. FL-GM1 diffusion then experiences a marked transition at a characteristic radius of
100 nm, before taking an affine regime. From the slope at r < 80 nm, expressing
d as
d = area/(4
D), we estimate an effective coefficient D = 0.36 ± 0.10 µm2/s. For larger observation areas (r > 200 nm),
d can be written as
d = area/(4
D) + t0, with t0 = 16.3 ± 1.5 ms and D = 1.7 ± 0.2 µm2/s. The difference between these regimes enlightens the transition between the diffusion behaviors, even if D cannot be straightforwardly interpreted as the exact diffusion coefficients before and after the transition.
The relative change of diffusion behaviors measured for FL-PC and FL-GM1 guarantees the relevance of the method. These lipid analogs exhibit very different diffusion laws, indicating that our observations depend on the probed component. For the range of nanoaperture diameters tested, this rules out the possibility that the observed regimes are artifactual. This point is reinforced by the fact that for every marker the diffusion times within larger nanoholes (r > 200 nm) agrees nicely with those obtained using diffraction-limited spots. It is probable that the membrane area within nanoholes does not equal the aperture area, but the correction could only account for slight changes of diffusion laws but cannot explain the different behaviors (see the discussion in the Supplementary Material online). Hereafter, we will extract information on the heterogeneities hindering the diffusion of FL-GM1, but before we describe experimental data on the diffusion of GPI-anchored proteins.
The diffusion of GPI-anchored protein is hindered by cholesterol-dependent structures
We investigated the diffusion of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) anchored to a glycosylphophatidylinositol (GPI). Fig. 3 summarizes the results, showing a typical ACF function obtained for a 95-nm radius nanoaperture together with the corresponding curve of the average diffusion time versus the aperture area. Fig. S2 of the Supplementary Material shows nonnormalized ACFs in nanoapertures of various radii. The FCS diffusion law of GFP-GPI displays a marked transition at a characteristic radius of
120 nm (Fig. 3 B). From the slope at r < 100 nm, we estimate an effective coefficient D = 0.30 ± 0.05 µm2/s, whereas for r > 140 nm, we get D = 0.9 ± 0.2 µm2/s, which is
3 times the value found for r < 100 nm (expressing
d = area/(4
D) + t0, with t0 = 8.7 ± 1.3 ms). Again, the results obtained for the largest apertures match well with those obtained using diffraction-limited beams, indicating that the probed area is defined by the aperture area and that the aperture does not strongly alter the diffusion process.
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Microdomain model simulations and estimates for the sizes of domains
We recently developed numerical models of diffusion into a membrane with confinement structures (15
). These structures are areas which confine molecules transiently: their boundaries are sufficiently impenetrable so that the confinement time within the corral is longer than the diffusion time across it. We first consider the case of isolated domains, as indicated in Fig. 4 A. In a previous theoretical study, we have shown that diffusion in a such landscape leads to FCS diffusion laws with a marked transition from linear to affine with a positive shift (15
). Briefly, isolated domains are assumed to be circular with radius a, periodically spaced and static. In this model, molecules can diffuse in and out of the domains with a prescribed probability. The simulations do not depend on the position of the observation area relative to the confining domains, as we averaged the simulated data for the different positions of the beam area. The simulated average diffusion time
d is displayed in Fig. 4 B versus the normalized area
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. We can thus estimate the radii of the confining structures to be
40 nm for GFP-GPI and 30 nm for FL-GM1. These results come fully within the framework of lipid rafts (19
Transferrin receptor TfR evidences that a cytoskeleton-mediated meshwork also contributes to the lateral compartmentalization in the cell membrane
A cytoskeleton-mediated meshwork also plays a critical role in the membrane lateral organization (9
,21
). We thus investigated the diffusion of the human transferrin receptor TfR, a transmembrane protein was tagged with the fluorescent protein EGFP (TfR-GFP) whose diffusion is sensitive to the actin cytoskeleton. Fig. 5 displays a typical ACF function obtained for a 210-nm radius nanoaperture, together with the corresponding FCS diffusion law. The results for TfR-GFP clearly differ from the diffusion laws found for GFP-GPI and FL-GM1. Fig. 5 B shows two transitions, respectively at r
150 nm and r
230 nm. As the probed area increases, the diffusion time grows first with an apparent coefficient D = 0.23 ± 0.02 µm2/s, then levels off to D = 0.7 ± 0.1 µm2/s, before increasing again with an effective diffusion rate D = 0.27 ± 0.03 µm2/s and a negative time intercept at the origin t0 = -22 ± 2 ms.
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. From the measurements on TfR-GFP, the characteristic size of the network can be estimated to be
230 nm, which appears consistent with the mesh size found for the actin meshwork in rat kidney fibroblast (21
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50 nm for TfR-GFP. | CONCLUSION |
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| SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL |
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| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS |
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This work was supported by the "ACI Nanosciences" of the French Research ministry, specific grants from UE FEDER and institutional grants from CNRS and INSERM.
Submitted on September 4, 2006; accepted for publication October 13, 2006.
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