I can't say much about this without reading the paper in the company of Somebody Who Knows About Chemistry, but Jack Szostak's team at the Harvard Medical School has done some interesting looking work on the self assembly of lipids into miscelles that could contain DNA reactions. What is new to me is the claim that lipids might have been formed in hydrothermal vents rather than as by-products of the original chemical cycle. But it doesn't explain how the transition from "found" lipid monomers to "made" monomers arose. Anyway, check it out.
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I remember for a couple years, it was "lipid rafts this" and "lipid rafts that." The idea of the lipid rafts -- for the uninitiated -- was that there were microdomains in the plasma membranes of cells defined by their more hydrophobic composition.
The following press release touches on a recently emerging and probably valid method of addressing some infections.
I have heard of some animals using sugars as antifreeze (check out the prior blog on wood frogs that freeze and survive!), but never lipids.
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