Gorter and Grendel

Gorter and Grendel in 1925 [527], drawing on the work of Langmuir, extracted lipids from RBC ghosts and formed monolayers. They discovered that the area of the monolayer was twice that of the calculated membrane surface of intact RBC, indicating the presence of a bilayer. This was the birth of the concept of a lipid bilayer as the fundamental structure of cell membranes (Fig. 7.1). 

Following the original simple concepts of Gorter and Grendel, a large number of membrane models have been developed over the subsequent half a century the two most contrasting are shown in Fig. 6.9. 

Apart from the characterization of lipids in monolayers, several other examples for the versatility of this method have been described. Gorter and Grendel postulated... 

Gorter and Grendel, Proc. K. Akad. Wetensch. Amsterdam, 29, 1268 (1926). Grendel, Thesis (Utrecht, 1927). 

As already mentioned, the generally accepted bimolecular leaflet model of the plasma membrane is that first proposed by Gorter and Grendel in 1925, which has dominated our thinking ever since [2]. Until then, our knowledge or the properties of bimolecular lipid layers was derived entirely from indirect experimental evidence. In 1961, the reconstitution of membranous structures from lipids of bovine brain was finally achieved [1-4]. These reconstituted membranes not only had a thickness ranging from 6 to 9 nm. 

Although the structural hypothesis of the molecular conformation of biological membranes was introduced over five decades ago (Gorter and Grendel, 1925), we still do not know the real structure of the cell membrane. Early research into membrane structure dates back to 1895, when Overton proposed the existence of lipid components in biological membranes. On the basis of experiments with human red cells, Gorter and Grendel (1925) concluded that the lipid was spread over the red cell surface in a bimolecular layer, with hydrophobic tails directed toward the center of the lipid leaflet and polar, hydrophilic heads on the surface. 

The recognition of lipid as one of the major components of biological membranes dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Overton, 1895 Gorter and Grendel, 1925). The immiscibility of lipids and water has been a stimulus to the investigation of lipid components of the membrane since its nature as a permeability barrier... 

In 1925, the Dutch workers, Gorter and Grendel extracted the lipids from erythrocytes and calculated the area occupied by the lipid from a known... 

Gorter and Grendel s bimolecular lipid membrane. Circles represent the polar ends of the molecule while the bars represent the long chain hydrocarbon moieties. 

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