This might very well be a dumb question. I'm reading up for this internship I have in a couple of weeks, and the papers I'm studying keep mentioning something called a "model membrane." the internship is based on researching the biophysics lipid membranes. here are a couple of sentences that confused me...

"During the last years, some of the physical properties of the plasma membrane have been studied with model membranes that mimic the lipid composition of rafts. Model membranes are still far away from representing the intricacy found in cells, but they constitute simplistic systems that can help understanding the principles of the processes that happen in cellular membranes."

it seems that this is saying "model membranes" are not membranes from real cells. the only other thing I could think of would be your basic, plastic cell membrane model, but i don't think that's what theyre referring to.

could anyone tell me what is meant by "model membranes"? thanks!

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