Laurdan in living cells: Where do we stand?

Laurdan is a valuable tool for analyzing phase transitions and general behavior in synthetic lipid membranes. Its use is very straightforward, thus, its application in cells has expanded rapidly in recent years. It has been demonstrated that Laurdan is very useful for analyzing membrane trends when cells are subjected to some treatment, or when different cell mutations are compared. However, a deep interpretation of the data is not as straightforward as in synthetic lipid bilayers. In this review, we complied results found in mammalian and bacterial cells and noted that the use of Laurdan could be improved if a comparison between publications could be done. At the moment this is not easy, mainly due to the lack of complete information in the publications, and to the different methodologies employed in the data recording and processing. We conclude that research in cell membrane topics would benefit from a better use of the Laurdan probe.