Figure 2.

Lipid mixing at various cholesterol concentrations. (A) Fluorescence lipid-mixing assay of SNARE-mediated membrane fusion. Fluorescence change for lipid mixing was normalized with respect to the maximum fluorescence intensity (MFI) obtained by adding 0.1% reduced Triton X-100. The change of the fluorescence intensity in time was fitted with Eq. 1. (B) Rates of lipid mixing at various cholesterol concentrations. The rate was approximated by the inverse of the half-life (t_1/2)⁻¹ and the data were normalized with respect to the rate at the 0% cholesterol. The error bars were calculated on the basis of five independent measurements with five separately prepared vesicle samples. Error bars indicate SE.