Related papers: Perfluorooctanoic acid rigidifies a model lipid me…
We propose a robust simulation method for phospholipid membranes. It is based on a mixed three-field formulation that accounts for tangential fluidity (Boussinesq-Scriven law), bending elasticity (Canham-Helfrich model) and inextensibility.…
The electrostatic contribution to spontaneous membrane curvature is calculated within Poisson-Boltzmann theory under a variety of assumptions and emphasizing parameters in the physiological range. Asymmetric surface charges, either fixed…
Mechanotransduction, the biological response to mechanical stress, is often initiated by the activation of mechanosensitive (MS) proteins upon mechanically induced deformations of the cell membrane. A current challenge to fully understand…
Understanding dynamic and complex interaction of biological membranes with extracellular matrices plays a crucial role in controlling a variety of cell behavior and functions, from cell adhesion and growth to signaling and differentiation.…
Monolayer spontaneous curvatures for cholesterol, DOPE, POPE, DOPC, DPPC, DSPC, POPC, SOPC, and egg sphingomyelin were obtained using small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) on inverted hexagonal phases (HII). Spontaneous curvatures of bilayer…
The supramolecular assembly of lipids into bilayer membranes is essential for cellular structure and function. However, the impact of lipid structural variations such as acyl chain length, degree of unsaturation, and headgroup type on…
We consider DNA-cationic lipid complexes that form lamellar stacks of lipid bilayers with parallel DNA strands intercalated in between. We calculate the electrostatically induced elastic deformations of the lipid bilayers. It is found that…
Lipid bilayer membranes have a native (albeit small) permeability for water molecules. Under an external load, provided that the bilayer structure stays intact and does not suffer from poration or rupture, a lipid membrane deforms and its…
One of the most widely used methods for determination of the bending elasticity modulus of model lipid membranes is the analysis of the shape fluctuations of nearly spherical lipid vesicles. The theoretical basis of this analysis is given…
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…
It was recently discovered that friction between surfaces bearing phosphatidylcholine (PC) lipid bilayers can be increased by two orders of magnitude or more via an externally-applied electric field, and that this increase is fully…
A coarse-grained molecular model, which consists of a spherical particle and an orientation vector, is proposed to simulate lipid membrane on a large length scale. The solvent is implicitly represented by an effective attractive interaction…
We present a stochastic phase-field model for multicomponent lipid bilayers that explicitly accounts for the quasi-two-dimensional hydrodynamic environment unique to a thin fluid membrane immersed in aqueous solution. Dynamics over a wide…
Atomistic simulations were performed on hydrated model lipid multilayers that are representative of the lipid matrix in the outer skin (stratum corneum). We find that cholesterol transfers easily between adjacent leaflets belonging to the…
The influence of an electric field on a poorly conductive membrane such as a lipid bilayer is studied theoretically. The unbalanced electric stress created by an ionic current across a non-perfectly flat membrane gives rise to a…
Cholesterol is known to modulate the structure and function of biological membranes. In this study, we use self-consistent field theory (SCFT) to investigate phospholipid/cholesterol bilayer membranes modeled with two types of diblock…
The influence of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) on membrane thickness, multilamellar repeat distance, and phase transitions of 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphatidylcholine (DPPC) was investigated by X-ray diffraction and small-angle neutron…
Water activity and its relationship with interactions stabilising lamellar stacks of mixed lipid bilayers in their fluid state are investigated by means of osmotic pressure measurements coupled with small-angle x-ray scattering. The…
Current fluctuations in pure lipid membranes have been shown to occur under the influence of transmembrane electric fields (electroporation) as well as a result from structural rearrangements of the lipid bilayer during phase transition…
We study a dynamical curvature instability caused by a local chemical modification of a phospholipid membrane. In our experiments, a basic solution is microinjected close to a giant unilamellar vesicle, which induces a local chemical…