Development and Application of Bicelles for Use in Biological NMR and Other Biophysical Studies

The term “bicelles” was first proposed in 1995 to describe aqueous assemblies of detergent and lipid that were believed to be “binary, bilayered mixed micelles bearing a resemblance to the classical model for bile salt-phosphatidylcholine aggregates” [1]. At that time, bicellar mixtures had already been in use for several years as magnetically alignable model membranes in solid-state NMR studies of membrane-associated molecules (Figure 1). Since 1995, there have been dramatic advances both in the applications of bicelles and in our understanding that bicellar mixtures are morphologically more complex than originally thought. Here, we trace the development and application of bicelles from their initial development in the late 1980s. Other reviews of bicelles and related developments in NMR and sample alignment methods are also available [2–10].