Biological membranes are more complex than was first thought when the ‘fluid mosaic model’ was proposed in 1972. Membranes are a mixture of many different types of lipidic and protein components, and their relative amounts and composition differ between functionally distinct domains. There is, however, some fluidity between these membrane compartments as vesicles bud off from one compartment and fuse with another. Ongoing studies are revealing the protein and lipidic signals that control the exquisite specificity of these dynamic vesicular processes.

Membrane proteins typically make up around a third of the proteome of a cell. Nevertheless, molecular-level understanding of membrane proteins lags far behind that of water-soluble proteins owing to the difficulty in obtaining high-resolution structural information. The recent and rapidly expanding crop of membrane protein structures is revolutionizing understanding of the principles that govern the folding of these proteins.

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