Fig. 1.

Schematic representations of the main confinement sources in the plasma membrane associated to their expected diffusion behaviour. a Membrane skeleton pickets-and-fences model: the cytoskeleton (brown) generates barriers through the filaments and the anchored proteins (not represented in this study) to the diffusion of proteins and lipids. The diffusion of a protein is represented with a red arrow. Escapes from the compartments are possible giving rise to a “hop-diffusion” [17]. b Lipid rafts assemble preferentially cholesterol and saturated lipids in a liquid-ordered phase represented by the circles. Some proteins have an affinity for these domains as revealed by transient confinement zones in their trajectories (red arrows). c Protein–protein interactions generate stable cluster phases characterised by dynamic nanodomains of proteins (circles). These nanodomains can interact into larger domains (in grey). Proteins are confined in these nanoclusters. Red arrows represents the trajectory of a protein, while gray arrow represents the trajectory of the whole cluster