Related papers: Melting transitions in biomembranes
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…
Biological membranes are complex, dynamic structures essential for cellular compartmentalization, signaling, and mechanical integrity. The molecular organization of eukaryotic membranes has been extensively studied, including the lipid…
Biomembranes are thin capacitors with the unique feature of displaying phase transitions in a physiologically relevant regime. We investigate the voltage and lateral pressure dependence of their capacitance close to their chain melting…
The Fluid Mosaic Model by Singer & Nicolson proposes that biological membranes consist of a fluid lipid layer into which integral proteins are embedded. The lipid membrane acts as a two-dimensional liquid in which the proteins can diffuse…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
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…
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 proteins within heterogeneous cell membranes where non-equilibrium phenomena arises from spatial variations in concentration and temperature. We develop simulation methods building on non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to…
We carry out a theoretical study of the vibrational and relaxation properties of naturally-occurring proteins with the purpose of characterizing both the folding and equilibrium thermodynamics. By means of a suitable model we provide a full…
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…
Membranes containing a wide variety of ternary mixtures of high chain-melting temperature lipids, low chain-melting temperature lipids, and cholesterol undergo lateral phase separartion into coexisting liquid phases at a miscibility…
We study the indentation of a free-standing lipid membrane suspended over a nanopore on a hydrophobic substrate by means of molecular dynamics simulations. We find that in the course of indentation, the membrane bends at the point of…
In the proximity of melting transitions of artificial and biological membranes fluctuations in enthalpy, area, volume and concentration are enhanced. This results in domain formation, changes of the elastic constants, changes in…
The thermodynamic properties for three different types of off-lattice four-strand beta-sheet protein models interacting via a hybrid Go-type potential have been investigated. Discontinuous molecular dynamic simulations have been performed…
Understanding how proteins fold into their native structure is a fundamental problem in biophysics, crucial for protein design. It has been hypothesized that the formation of a molten globule intermediate precedes folding to the native…
Melting is omnipresent in nature and technology, with applications ranging from metallurgy, biology, food science, and latent thermal energy storage to oceanography, geophysics, and climate science, and occurring on all scales from…
We study the effect of membrane proteins on the shape, composition and thermodynamic stability of the surrounding membrane. When the coupling between membrane composition and curvature is strong enough the nearby composition and shape both…
The thermodynamics of proteins indicate that folding/unfolding takes place either through stable intermediates or through a two-state process without intermediates. The rather short folding times of the two-state process indicate that…
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…
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,…