The antioxidant vitamin E is a commonly used vitamin supplement. Although the multi-billion dollar vitamin and nutritional supplement industry encourages the use of vitamin E, there is very little evidence supporting its actual health benefits. Moreover, vitamin E is now marketed as a lipid raft destabilizing anti-cancer agent, in addition to its antioxidant behaviour. Here, we studied the influence of vitamin E and some of its vitamers on membrane raft stability using phase separating unilamellar lipid vesicles in conjunction with small-angle scattering techniques and fluorescence microscopy. We find that lipid phase behaviour remains unperturbed well beyond physiological concentrations of vitamin E (up to a mole fraction of 0.10). Our results are consistent with a proposed line active role of vitamin E at the domain boundary. We discuss the implications of these findings as they pertain to lipid raft modification in native membranes, and propose a new hypothesis for the antioxidant mechanism of vitamin E.

中文翻译：

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抗氧化剂维生素 E 作为膜筏调节剂：生育酚不会消除脂质结构域。

抗氧化剂维生素E是一种常用的维生素补充剂。尽管价值数十亿美元的维生素和营养补充剂行业鼓励使用维生素 E，但很少有证据支持其实际的健康益处。此外，维生素E除了具有抗氧化作用外，现在还作为一种脂筏不稳定抗癌剂进行销售。在这里，我们使用相分离单层脂质囊泡结合小角散射技术和荧光显微镜研究了维生素 E 及其一些维生素体对膜筏稳定性的影响。我们发现，在维生素 E 的生理浓度（摩尔分数高达 0.10）之外，脂质相行为仍然不受干扰。我们的结果与维生素 E 在域边界处的拟议线活性作用一致。我们讨论了这些发现与天然膜中脂筏修饰相关的意义，并提出了维生素 E 抗氧化机制的新假设。