Related papers: Voltage-gated lipid ion channels
The interaction potential between supported floating bilayers has been determined by grazing incidence specular and off-specular scattering using synchrotron radiation. Our measurements demonstrate that floating bilayers are significantly…
Lipid rafts are heterogeneous dynamic lipid domains of the cell membranes that are involved in several biological processes, like protein and lipids specific transport and signaling. Our understanding of lipid raft formation is still…
The field of nanofluidics has shown considerable progress over the past decade thanks to key instrumental advances, leading to the discovery of a number of exotic transport phenomena for fluids and ions under extreme confinement. Recently,…
A biomimetic model of cell-cell communication was developed to probe the passive molecular transport across ion channels inserted in synthetic lipid bilayers formed between contacting droplets arranged in a linear array. Diffusion of a…
Recent experiments have demonstrated that the timescale of adaptation of single neurons and ion channel populations to stimuli slows down as the length of stimulation increases; in fact, no upper bound on temporal time-scales seems to exist…
For many biotechnological applications it would be useful to better understand the effects produced by electric fields on lipid membranes. This review discusses several aspects of the electrostatic properties of a planar lipid membrane with…
We propose an alternative mechanism for the gating of biological membrane channels in response to membrane tension that involves a change in the slope of the membrane near the channel. Under biological membrane tensions we show that the…
A minimalist simulation model for lipid bilayers is presented. Each lipid is represented by a flexible chain of beads in implicit solvent. The hydrophobic effect is mimicked through an intermolecular pair potential localized at the…
Tension in lipid membranes is often controlled externally, by pulling on the boundary of the membrane or changing osmotic pressure across a curved membrane. But modifications of the tension can also be induced in an internal fashion, for…
Engineering the synthetic nanopores through lipid bilayer membrane to access the interior of a cell is a long persisting challenge in biotechnology. Here, we demonstrate the stability and dynamics of a tile-based 6-helix DNA nanotube (DNT)…
The activity of cell membrane inclusions (such as ion channels) is influenced by the host lipid membrane, to which they are elastically coupled. This coupling concerns the hydrophobic thickness of the bilayer (imposed by the length of the…
A simple theory of ion permeation through a channel is presented, in which diffusion occurs according to Fick's law and drift according to Ohm's law, in the electric field determined by all the charges present. This theory accounts for…
This paper presents a model and numerical analysis (simulations) of transmembrane potential induced in biological cell membrane under the influence of externally applied electric field (i.e., electroporation). This model differs from the…
Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…
Characterizing the local voltage distribution within nanophysiological domains, driven by ionic currents through membrane channels, is crucial for studying cellular activity in modern biophysics, yet it presents significant experimental and…
We investigate how an externally imposed curvature influences lipid segregation on two-phase-coexistent membranes. We show that the bending-modulus contrast of the two phases and the curvature act together to yield a reduced effective line…
We consider a model of bilayer lipid membrane with bola-lipids. The bola-lipid is modeled by linking tails of the hydrophobic chains in the opposite monolayers within bilayer as a first approximation. A number of thermodynamical…
Lipid bilayers forming biological membranes are known to behave as viscous 2D fluids on submicrometer scales; usually they contain a large number of active protein inclusions. Recently, it has been shown [Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 112,…
In a recent work we proposed a coarse-grained methodology for studying the response of peptides when simulated at different values of pH; in this work we extend the methodology to analyze the pH-dependent behavior of coiled coils. This…
We combine quantum-chemical calculations and molecular dynamics simulations to consider aqueous ion flow across non-axisymmetric nanopores in monolayer graphene and MoS$_2$. When the pore-containing membrane is subject to uniaxial tensile…