Lipids play critical roles in many physiological processes, including cell signaling, cell development, and maintaining cell membrane fluidity and flexibility. After synthesis, lipids are trafficked to different cellular locations to maintain cellular lipid homeostasis. Therefore, cellular lipid transport is a fundamental process essential to all cell growth, division, and differentiation. In recent years, lipid transporters have also been considered potential drug targets for prohibiting infections of pathogens, providing alternative therapeutic strategies against pathogens.

This methods collection aims to collect comprehensive methods on the biochemical and biophysical analysis of lipid transporters. Methods in this collection include protein purification (eg. recombinant protein expressions using bacterial and mammalian cell-based expression systems; purifications through various affinity tags and chromatography resins); biophysical approaches (e.g. X-ray crystallography; Cryo-EM; NMR) and biochemical approaches (eg. MST; ITC; SPR). Also, other lipid-relevant methods, such as lipid extraction, lipid binding, and transport assays will be included as well.