Figure 2.

(A) Schematic illustration of caveolae and planar lipid rafts on the cell membranes. (B) Schematic diagram of caveolin-1 primary structure and predicted topology. Schematic showing that cav-1 is an integral membrane protein. The primary structure and predicted topology is illustrated here. Cav-1 often self-associates to a homo-oligomer which is called a caveolar assembly unit. Each caveolar assembly unit is composed of 14–16 monomers. Here, we show a dimer of cav-1 formed by two cav-1 monomers via the oligomerization domain (yellow color). The amino- and carboxyl-ends face towards the cytosol side. A hairpin loop (transmembrane domain, blue color) inserts into the membrane bilayer. The amino-terminal membrane-attachment domain is the caveolin scaffolding domain (CSD) (violet color).