Sarah Veatch PhD Postdoctoral Fellow Cornell University Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Baker Laboratory Ithaca NY 14853-1301 (607) 255-4848 sv232 at cornell.edu
I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Baird/Holowka laboratory at Cornell University trying to understand lateral organization in cell plasma membranes.  I recently worked with Bob Hancock at UBC, and did my PhD work in Sarah Keller's laboratory at the University of Washington

cv	links	thesis: web print

Through my PhD research studying liquid immiscibility in model bilayer membranes, I have become increasingly interested in the role that lipids themselves play in the structure and organization of cell membranes.  It is thought that condensed domains of saturated lipids, cholesterol, and certain membrane proteins, termed “lipid rafts,” play a vital role in many cellular pathways. This “raft hypothesis” has motivated my previous work to characterize immiscible liquid phases in model lipid membranes containing cholesterol by fluorescence microscopy and NMR. In my current research, I am applying some of the lessons learned from simple models to decipher the complex ordering and organization of proteins and lipids in cell membranes.

Selected publications: 1. S. L. Veatch and S.L. Keller, Separation of Liquid Phases in Giant Vesicles of Ternary Mixtures of Phospholipids and Cholesterol Biophys. J. (2003) 85(5) 3074-83. link 2. S. L. Veatch, I. V. Polozov, K. Gawrisch, and S. L. Keller, Liquid domains in vesicles investigated byNMR and fluorescence microscopy. Biophys. J. (2004) 86(5) 2910-22. link 3. S. L. Veatch and S. L. Keller, Miscibility Phase Diagrams of Giant Vesicles Containing Sphingomyelin. Phys. Rev. Lett. (2005) 94(14), 148101. 4. S. L. Veatch and S. L. Keller, Seeing Spots: Complex Phase Behavior in Simple Membranes Biochim Biophys Acta. 1746(3) 172-85. (2005) Review. 5. S. L. Veatch, K. Gawrisch, and S. L. Keller, Closed-loop miscibility gap and quantitative tie-lines in ternary membranes containing diphytanoyl PC. Biophys J. (2006) 90(12) 4428-36  link 6. P. Cicuta, S. L. Keller, and S. L. Veatch, Diffusion of liquid domains in lipid bilayer membranes. Submitted. abstract 7. S. L. Veatch and R. E. W. Hancock, Heat Capacity Measurements at the Miscibility Transition in Membranes of DOPC, DPPC and Cholesterol. Submitted. abstract 8. S. L. Veatch, S. Leung, and J. Thewalt, Fluorescent probes alter miscibility phase boundaries in ternary vesicles. Submitted. abstract 9. S. L. Veatch, O. Soubias O, S. L. Keller, and K. Gawrisch, Phase diagrams and critical phenonema in three component lipid membranes. In preparation.