Dear Mariana Oliveira ,

I suppose you mean the following source:

Evans WH (1987) Organelles and membranes of animal cells. In: Findlay JBC, Evans WH (eds) Biological membranes: a practical approach. IRL, Oxford, pp 1-35

Which I unfortunately don’t have access to either. However, a good starting point might be:

Sandelius A.S., Morré D.J. (1990) Plasma Membrane Isolation. In: Larsson C., Møller I.M. (eds) The Plant Plasma Membrane. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-74522-5_3

See enclosed attachment.

Hope this helps you a step further.

Best regards.

Hi Rob Keller , thank you for your answer!

Yes, I really wish I had that book of Evans, but it's not available in my country (Brasil). So I have to search for papers instead. This protocol you mentioned I saw a while ago but I got worried about their focus on plant membrane. I'll have to extract plasma membrane lipids from human cells and the reports for this substrate is a bit scarce.

Do you know if this protocol could be suitable for human cells either? I've gratuated in engineering, so I'm not so good to evaluate this.

Best regards, Rob. Thank you so much.

Dear Mariana Oliveira ,

In principal yes.

It very much depends on your source. Often (as a model for human cells) so-called HeLa cell line is used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

For a detailed procedure you need to know what the material is that you need work with.

But as you can see in the source I’ve provided, it always comes down to the following steps:

1. Isolation of the rough material (plant tissue, bacteria, human tissue (?) or a (human) cell line

2. Obtaining the proper membrane fraction (mostly sucrose centrifugation kind of step)

3. Additional purification of the (proper) membrane fraction

4. Depending on what you want (in your case lipid fraction) for example extraction of lipids

Lipids are often obtained by Bligh & Dyer extraction (or a variation on this).

I am afraid that more detailed than this is difficult (and I doubt whether your book would provide more info). You need to know first what exactly the ‘source’ is you need to work with. Is it a cell line or blood samples from patients etc.

The above scheme (and the earlier mentioned source) give you the overall idea.

Hope this helps you somewhat further.

Best regards.