Welcome to ILYA LEVENTAL'S home page.  You've entered a wonderful world of wisdom, all about the person you came here to find.  On this site, you will find:

1. my research interests and publications
2. contact and personal information about your truly
3. links to people and places that are near and dear to me
4. travel blog and personal pictures for those that are interested

Check the links on the right or the tabs above the main picture for those locations. But for now...

My Research Interests

My primary research interests are the physical principles and biological manifestations of lateral lipid organization in biological membranes.  The plasma membranes of protozoan and animal cells function as the interface between the enclosed environment of the cytoplasm and the outside world.  As part of this function, membrane constituents are responsible for signal transduction across the membrane, regulation of cell entry of a huge variety of biologically-active molecules, mechanical integrity of the cell through interaction of the membrane with the underlying cytoskeleton, and attachment of cells to the extracellular matrix.  Despite this inherent importance, and although the structure-function relationships of proteins and nucleic acids have been the dominant paradigm of molecular biology for the last half century, the functional relevance of lipid membrane structure has only recently been considered. 

The molecular model for the structure of the plasma membrane of eukaryotic cells published by Singer and Nicholson in 1972 conceptualized the membrane as a two-dimensional fluid of lipids arranged in an inversely symmetric bilayer.  In this model, the lipid components of the plasma membrane act as a solvent for the functional units of the membrane, ie transmembrane and peripheral membrane proteins and channels.  In the last decade, the concurrent investigation of cholesterol-dependent liquid-liquid phase separation in model membranes and the existence of distinct plasma membrane fractions in detergent extracts has led to the formulation of the membrane raft hypothesis.  This hypothesis and its supporting data (along with a variety of other data) has led to a reevaluation of the Singer-Nicholson model to a view of biological membranes as composed of a mosaic of different membrane domains with heterogeneous lipid and protein compositions and distinct functions.

My major research interests are investigating the biological relevance of liquid phase coexistence in the context of the lipid raft hypothesis.  Partly working with a novel membrane model system, Giant Plasma Membrane Vesicles (see awesome pic on right), I am studying protein partitioning, cell-type dependence and compositional dependence of phase coexistence.