Related papers: Phase state dependent current fluctuations in pure…
In hydrodynamic descriptions of lipid bilayers, the membrane is often approximated as being impermeable to the surrounding, solute-containing fluid. However, biological and in vitro lipid membranes are influenced by their permeability and…
It is well known that at the gel-liquid phase transition temperature a lipid bilayer membrane exhibits an increased ion permeability. We analyze the quantized currents in which the increased permeability presents itself. The open time…
The interpretation electrical phenomena in biomembranes is usually based on the assumption that the experimentally found discrete ion conduction events are due to a particular class of proteins called ion channels while the lipid membrane…
We study the stress distribution profiles and the height and thickness fluctuations of lipid membranes in the tilted gel state by Monte Carlo simulations of a generic coarse-grained model for lipid membranes, which reproduces many known…
By means of lattice-based Monte Carlo simulations, we address properties of two-component lipid membranes on the experimentally relevant spatial scales of order of a micrometer and time intervals of order of a second, using DMPC/DSPC lipid…
We review recent computer simulation studies of undulating lipid bilayers. Theoretical interpretations of such fluctuating membranes are most commonly based on generalized Helfrich-type elastic models, with additional contributions of local…
We investigate the permeability of lipid membranes for fluorescence dyes and ions. We find that permeability reaches a maximum close to the chain melting transition of the membranes. Close to transitions, fluctuations in area and…
Native membranes of biological cells display melting transitions of their lipids at a temperature of 10-20 degrees below body temperature. Such transitions can be observed in various bacterial cells, in nerves, in cancer cells, but also in…
We consider fluctuations of the time-averaged current in the one-dimensional weakly-asymmetric exclusion process on a ring. The optimal density profile which sustains a given fluctuation exhibits an instability for low enough currents,…
Synthetic lipid membranes can display channel-like ion conduction events even in the absence of proteins. We show here that these events are voltage-gated with a quadratic voltage dependence as expected from electrostatic theory of…
The biological function of membranes is closely related to their softness, which is often studied through the membranes' thermally-driven fluctuations. The analysis commonly assumes that the relaxation rate of a pure bending deformation is…
Changes of external parameters in proximity of critical point can increase thermal fluctuations of tubular lipid membrane (TLM) and result in variation of the membrane shape. The phase transitions in the system are shown to be controlled by…
In an adiabatically shielded system the total enthalpy is conserved. Enthalpy fluctuations of an arbitrarily chosen subsystem must be buffered by the remainder of the total system which serves as a heat reservoir. The magnitude of these…
A theory of a lateral stress relaxation in a fluid bilayer membrane under a step-like pressure pulse is proposed. It is shown theoretically that transfer of lipid molecules into a strained region may lead to a substantial decrease of the…
Unassisted ion transport through lipid membranes plays a crucial role in many cell functions without which life would not be possible, yet the precise mechanism behind the process remains unknown due to its molecular complexity. Here, we…
Whether live cell membranes show miscibility phase transitions (MPTs), and if so, how they fluctuate near the transitions remain outstanding unresolved issues in physics and biology alike. Motivated by these questions we construct a generic…
We investigate the properties of membranes under tension by Monte-Carlo simulations of a generic coarse-grained model for lipid bilayers. We give a comprising overview of the behavior of several membrane characteristics, such as the area…
We present a theoretical description of the thermal fluctuations in a solid-supported stack of lipid bilayers, for the case of vanishing surface tension $\gamma = 0$ and in the framework of continuous smectic elasticity. The model is…
We study, using dissipative particle dynamics simulations, the effect of active lipid flip-flop on model fluid bilayer membranes. We consider both cases of symmetric as well as asymmetric flip-flops. Symmetric flip-flop leads to a steady…
A microscopic model of the lipid membrane is constructed that provides analytically tractable description of the physical mechanism of the first order liquid-gel phase transition. We demonstrate that liquid-gel phase transition is…