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. 2010 Jun 17;5(6):e11162. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011162

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Martinez-Seara et al.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.

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Panel (A) shows the three-dimensional structure of cholesterol. The positions of cholesterol's flat α-face and the rough β1- and β2-subfaces due to the two out-of-plane methyl groups C18 and C19 are shown. Panel (B) provides the numbering of the carbon atoms. Panels (A) and (B) show the reference axes used in this article. The origin of the axis is C13 colored in yellow. The vector between C13 (yellow) and C18 (orange) points along the x-axis. The triangle between C18 (orange), C13 (yellow) and C10 (blue) is in the xz-plane and is depicted in red. This plane divides the molecule between the β1-face y>0 and β2-face y<0. The atoms of cholesterol that belong to the β1-face are shown in brown, while those in the β2-face are colored in green. Panel (C) shows a schematic view of cholesterol as a projection in the reference xy-plane from the terminal acyl chain towards the head as shown in Panel (D) by the arrow. The other sterol analyzed in this work, Dchol, is obtained by the removal of the off-plane methyl groups C18 and C19 as shown in Panel (B).