Related papers: Probing lipid membrane bending mechanics using gol…
Cell membranes separate the cell interior from the external environment. They are constituted by a variety of lipids; their composition determines the dynamics of membrane proteins and affects the ability of the cells to adapt. Even though…
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,…
The small mass and atomic-scale thickness of graphene membranes make them highly suitable for nanoelectromechanical devices such as e.g. mass sensors, high frequency resonators or memory elements. Although only atomically thick, many of the…
The curvature of biological membranes at the nanometer scale is critically important for vesicle trafficking, organelle morphology, and disease propagation. This manuscript reports the development of Polarized Localization Microscopy (PLM),…
We present a novel buckling instability relevant to membrane budding in eukaryotic cells. In this mechanism, curved filaments bind to a lipid bilayer without changing its intrinsic curvature. As more and more filaments adsorb, newly added…
The viscosity of lipid bilayer membranes plays an important role in determining the diffusion constant of embedded proteins and the dynamics of membrane deformations, yet it has historically proven very difficult to measure. Here we…
We consider the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers containing transmembrane proteins of arbitrary shape. This biologically-motivated problem is relevant to the cell membrane, whose fluctuating dynamics play a key role in phenomena ranging from…
Diffusion in cell membranes is not just simple two-dimensional Brownian motion, but typically depends on the timescale of the observation. The physical origins of this anomalous sub-diffusion are unresolved, and model systems capable of…
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…
We use coarse-grained Monte Carlo simulations to study the elastic properties of charged membranes in solutions of monovalent and pentavalent counterions. The simulation results of the two cases reveal trends opposite to each other. The…
The effect of AC electric fields on the elasticity of supported lipid bilayers has been investigated at the microscopic level using grazing incidence synchrotron x-ray scattering. A strong decrease in the membrane tension up to 1mN/m and a…
The vibrations of gold nanowires and nanorods are investigated numerically in the framework of continuum elasticity using the Rayleigh-Ritz variational method. Special attention is paid to identify the vibrations relevant in Raman…
The presence of wrinkles in Graphene Nanoribbons (GNR) and other two-dimensional (2D) materials significantly alter their mechanical, electronic, optical properties, which can be either beneficial or detrimental. Experimentally, it has been…
The Gaussian (saddle splay) rigidity of fluid membranes controls their equilibrium topology but is notoriously difficult to measure. In lipid mixtures, typical of living cells, linear interfaces separate liquid ordered (LO) from liquid…
The bending rigidity $k_c$ of bilayer vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers has been measured using single and dual-micropipet techniques. These copolymers are nearly a factor of 5 greater in hydrophobic membrane…
Many proteins and peptides have an intrinsic capacity to sense and induce membrane curvature, and play crucial roles for organizing and remodelling cell membranes. However, the molecular driving forces behind these processes are not well…
Molecular rotors form twisted conformations upon photoexcitation, with their fluorescent relaxation time serving as a measure of viscosity. They have been used to assess membrane viscosities but yield higher values compared to other…
In order to give insights into how anisotropic nano-objects interact with living cell membranes, and possibly self-assemble, we designed magnetic nanorods with average size around 100 nm x 1$\mu$m by assembling iron oxide nanocubes within a…
Lipid structures exhibit complex and highly dynamic lateral structure; and changes in lipid density and fluidity are believed to play an essential role in membrane targeting and function. The dynamic structure of liquids on the molecular…
We present a model for the efficient simulation of generic bilayer membranes. Individual lipids are represented by one head- and two tail-beads. By means of simple pair potentials these robustly self-assemble to a fluid bilayer state over a…