Effect of the volatile anesthetic agent isoflurane on lateral diffusion of cell membrane proteins

The volatile anesthetic isoflurane (ISO) has previously been shown to increase the fluidity of artificial lipid membranes, but very few studies have used biological cell membranes. Therefore, to investigate whether ISO affects the mobility of membrane proteins, fluorescence-labeled transferrin receptor (TfR) and glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchored protein were expressed in human embryonic kidney 293T cells and neural cells and lateral diffusion was examined using fluorescence recovery after photobleaching. Lateral diffusion of the TfR increased with ISO treatment. On the other hand, there was no effect on GPI-anchored protein. We also used GC/MS to confirm that there was no change in the concentration of ISO due to vaporization during measurement. These results suggest that ISO affects the mobility of transmembrane protein molecules in living cells.