Lipid raft idea is floated

The introduction of a fluorescent lipid probe, specifically fluorescent ceramide, in the mid-1980s (Lipsky and Pagano, 1983; Lipsky and Pagano, 1985) gave Gerrit van Meer and Kai Simons just the tool they needed to attack a nagging question.

For a decade, it had been known that the apical and basolateral membranes of epithelial cells had different lipid compositions (Kawai, 1974), and specifically that glycolipids are enriched apically. In 1981, the tight junction was proposed as the barrier that kept these two membrane populations distinct (Dragsten et al., 1981). Playing off a finding that different viruses budded from the different poles of cultured epithelial cells (Boulan and Sabatini, 1978), van Meer and Simons showed in 1982 that the envelopes of those viruses contained different...