2016 Volume 15 Issue 6 Pages 229-231
As a refinement of the fluid mosaic model for explaining cell membrane functions, membrane-skeleton fence model and anchored membrane protein picket model have been proposed according to the tracing experiment of a single molecule in plasma membrane. In addition, the experimental observation that the diffusive motion of a transmembrane protein in plasma membrane leads to a normal diffusion through two-step relaxation has suggested that there are two types of nested compartments, large and small. In this paper, we propose a virtual nested two-dimensional lattice model that can express a nested compartment structure of plasma membrane using three parameters in order to represent such a single molecule diffusion movement. Using this 2D lattice model, various diffusive motion simulations of one particle random walks were performed and their trajectories were analyzed by Detrended fluctuation analysis. As a result, we have confirmed that both plasma membrane models, "fence" and "picket," can be represented by our virtual nested 2D lattice model.
