Related papers: Coupling between Inclusions and Membranes at the N…
Membrane organization is essential for cellular functions such as signal transduction and membrane trafficking. A major challenge is to understand the lateral heterogeneous structures in membranes and membrane fluidity in the presence of…
Continuum elastic models that account for membrane thickness variations are especially useful in the description of nanoscale deformations due to the presence of membrane proteins with hydrophobic mismatch. We show that terms involving the…
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for physicists, since they…
We study membrane-protein interactions and membrane-mediated protein-protein interactions by Monte Carlo simulations of a generic coarse-grained model for lipid bilayers with cylindrical hydrophobic inclusions. The strength of the…
Understanding interactions between membranes requires measurements on well-controlled systems close to natural conditions, in which fluctuations play an important role. We have determined, by grazing incidence X-ray scattering, the…
Many lipid membrane-mediated transport processes--such as mechanically-gated channel activation and solute transport--involve structural and dynamical features on membrane thickness length scales. Most existing membrane models, however,…
We develop theory and computational methods to investigate particle inclusions embedded within curved lipid bilayer membranes. We consider the case of spherical lipid vesicles where inclusion particles are coupled through (i) intramembrane…
Gaining access to the cell interior is fundamental for many applications, such as electrical recording, drug and biomolecular delivery. A very promising technique consists of culturing cells on nano/micro pillars. The tight adhesion and…
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…
A phenomenological Landau elasticity for the shape, dilation, and lipid-tilt of bilayer membranes is developed. The shape mode couples with the sum of the monolayers' tilt, while the dilation mode couples with the difference of the…
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…
The structure of membrane-active peptides and their interaction with lipid bilayers can be studied in oriented lipid membranes deposited on solid substrates. Such systems are desirable for a number of surface-sensitive techniques. Here we…
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 consider a model of bilayer lipid membrane with interdigitation, in which the lipid tails of the opposite monolayers interpenetrate. The interdigitation is modeled by linking tails of the hydrophobic chains in the opposite monolayers…
In this paper, we examine the mechanical role of the lipid bilayer in ion channel conformation and function with specific reference to the case of the mechanosensitive channel of large conductance (MscL). In a recent paper (Wiggins and…
Using a lattice model and a versatile thermodynamic integration scheme, we study the critical Casimir interactions between inclusions embedded in a two-dimensional critical binary mixtures. For single-domain inclusions we demonstrate that…
The impact of nanomaterials on lung fluids or on the plasma membrane of living cells has prompted researchers to examine the interactions between nanoparticles and lipid vesicles. Recent studies have shown that nanoparticle-lipid…
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…
Viscosity is a key property of cell membranes that controls mobility of embedded proteins and membrane remodeling. Measuring it is challenging because existing approaches involve complex experimental designs and/or models, and the…
We investigated the X-ray scattering signal of highly aligned multilayers of the zwitterionic lipid 1,2-dilauroyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphatidylcholine containing pores formed by the antimicrobial peptide gramicidin as a function of the…