Cholesterol, sphingolipids, and glycolipids: What do we know about their role in raft-like membranes?

• Cholesterol is unique in terms of its quite superior ordering properties.
• Understanding of the functions of glycolipids is still vague.
• Cholesterol is able to modulate membrane receptor function.
• There is still a great amount of work to be done in force field development.

Lipids rafts are considered to be functional nanoscale membrane domains enriched in cholesterol and sphingolipids, characteristic in particular of the external leaflet of cell membranes. Lipids, together with membrane-associated proteins, are therefore considered to form nanoscale units with potential specific functions. Although the understanding of the structure of rafts in living cells is quite limited, the possible functions of rafts are widely discussed in the literature, highlighting their importance in cellular functions. In this review, we discuss the understanding of rafts that has emerged based on recent atomistic and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation studies on the key lipid raft components, which include cholesterol, sphingolipids, glycolipids, and the proteins interacting with these classes of lipids. The simulation results are compared to experiments when possible.

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