About four decades ago at a symposium on the Plasma Membrane,
organized jointly by the American and New York Heart Association, Donald
O. Rudin, Director of Basic Research at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric
Institute, in Philadelphia, and his associates reported in a paper entitled
'Reconstitution of Cell Membrane Structure in vitro and its Transformation
into an Excitable System '. As evidenced by the present volume, the rest as
they say was history. The reconstituted system has been known under
various names (black, bimolecular, bilayer lipid membrane, BLM for short,
or simply planar lipid bilayer). Call whatever name you prefer, a
conventional BLM about 5 nm thick is interposed between two aqueous
solutions. It is, together with lipid vesicles (liposomes), the most widely
used experimental model of biomembranes. This liquid-crystalline BLM,
embodied in the lipid bilayer principle of biomembranes, and upon
numerous years of development, above and beyond performing as a physical
boundary, has been evolved, to serve:
9 as a discriminatory barrier
9 as a conduit for transport
9 as a reactor for energy conversion
9 as a transducer for signal processing
9 as a bipolar electrode for redox reactions
9 as a site for molecular recognition and/or
9 other diverse functions such as apoptosis, signal transduction, etc.
To mark BLM's 40 th anniversary, we have invited some of our
colleagues to contribute a chapter describing their unique approach. It was
impossible to invite all of the active researchers of planar lipid bilayers, past
and present, to put in their work to this volume. The Editors offer their
apologies and will endeavor to include other investigators' pioneering and
outstanding work on planar BLMs and liposomes, not represented here, in
future volumes.