Testing the effectiveness of new medicines meant to bind specific cell membrane receptors could be speeded with a method for observation of what happens to a lipid bilayer membrane when a receptor on its surface binds an appropriate molecule. The technique uses standard bright field microscopy and was developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Currently, available drugs probably target only 10% of potential targets, and the new technique might target as much as 80% of existing pharmaceutical target modules on the cell membrane. The researchers say the existing methods for testing drugs are expensive and complicated, and they think that live cell membranes may not even be needed for such testing. Rather, they coated 5 mm diameter silica beads with a less complex cell membrane with a coating that has only a few of the thousands of molecules usually found in a cell membrane. However, the coating can be designed to include any target molecule. Researchers manipulated coatings to display various receptors and tested different proteins against them in solution. They were able to engineer a coating that makes the particles form a colloid in a desired phase. One of the advantages of the system is its ability to operate with standard optical microscopy. The researchers will continue to quantify their method to see how precise it can bead, and they are increasing the types of beads used while developing different statistical analysis approaches.