Collada Marugán, AinhoaCruz Rodríguez, AntonioPérez Gil, Jesús2025-01-302025-01-302024-11-23Collada, A., Cruz, A., & Pérez-Gil, J. (2025). Studying the interfacial activity and structure of pulmonary surfactant complexes. Chemistry and Physics of Lipids, 266, 105459. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemphyslip.2024.1054590009-308410.1016/j.chemphyslip.2024.105459https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/117233The authors acknowledge funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2021-124932OB-100).Pulmonary surfactant (PS) is a membranous complex that coats the respiratory air-liquid interface in air-breathing animal lungs. Its main function is to minimize the surface tension at the end of expiration, what is needed for preventing alveolar collapse. Although the tension reduction capabilities of surfactant depend on the formation of air-exposed phospholipid-enriched monolayers, the interfacial surfactant films are far from simple monolayers. Surfactant surface films are dynamically interconnected to continuously secreted newly synthetized material thanks to the action of a pair of very hydrophobic proteins, termed SP-B and SP-C, which are responsible to modulate the biophysical behavior of the complex. Other proteins in the system, such as the hydrophilic SP-A and SP-D, are integrated into different surfactant structures but participate primarily in the immune defense of the lung. In spite of countless studies on the structure and chemico-physical properties of surfactant membranes, the full complexity of surfactant three-dimensional structure is far from being completely understood. Here we review some of the most useful techniques that have allowed the characterization of the PS system along the years to develop the current models interpreting surfactant structure-function relationships.engAttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/journal article1873-2941https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemphyslip.2024.105459open access612.2541.182577.3Bioquímica (Biología)Neumología2403 Bioquímica2411.17 Fisiología de la Respiración