Interaction of Egg-Sphingomyelin with DOPC in Langmuir Monolayers

Lipid rafts are a dynamic microdomain structure found in recent years, enriched in sphin-golipids, cholesterol and particular proteins. The change of structure and function of lipid rafts could result in many diseases. In this work, the monolayer miscibility behavior of mixed systems of Egg-Sphingomyelin (ESM) with 1, 2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine was in-vestigated in terms of mean surface area per molecule and excess molecular area ΔA_ex at certain surface pressure, surface pressure and excess surface pressure Δπ_ex at certain mean molecular area. The stability and compressibility of the mixed monolayers was assessed by the parameters of surface excess Gibbs free energy ΔG_ex, excess Helmholtz energy ΔH_ex and elasticity. Thermodynamic analysis indicates ΔA_ex and Δπe_ex in the binary systems with positive deviations from the ideal behavior, suggesting repulsive interaction. The max-imum of ΔG_ex and ΔH_ex was at the molar fraction of ESM of 0.6, demonstrating the mixed monolayer was more unstable. The repulsive interaction induced phase separation in the monolayer