Related papers: Probing lipid membrane bending mechanics using gol…
Various properties of water are affected by confinement as the space-filling of the water molecules is very different from bulk water. In our study, we challenged the creation of a stable system in which water molecules are permanently…
Biological membranes are able to exhibit various morphology due to the fluidity of the lipid molecules within the monolayers. The shape transformation of membranes has been well described by the classical Helfrich theory, which consists…
Dynamic organization of the cytoskeletal filaments and rod-like proteins in the cell membrane and other biological interfaces occurs in many cellular processes. Previous modeling studies have considered the dynamics of a single rod on fluid…
Plasma membranes appear as deformable systems wherein molecules are free to move and diffuse giving rise to condensed microdomains (composed of ordered lipids, transmembrane proteins and cholesterol) surrounded by disordered lipid…
Several numerical methods for measuring the bending rigidity and the spontaneous curvature of fluid membranes are studied using two types of meshless membrane models. The bending rigidity is estimated from the thermal undulations of planar…
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…
According to the lipid raft hypothesis, biological lipid membranes are laterally heterogeneous and filled with nanoscale ordered "raft" domains, which are believed to play an important role for the organization of proteins in membranes.…
We use computer simulations and a simple free energy model to study the response of a bilayer membrane to the application of a negative (compressive) mechanical tension. Such a tension destabilizes the long wavelength undulation modes of…
Many of the cell membrane vital functions are achieved by the self-organization of the proteins and biopolymers embedded in it. The protein dynamics are in part determined by its drag. A large number of these proteins can polymerize to form…
Multivalent interactions between deformable mesoscopic units are ubiquitous in biology, where membrane macromolecules mediate the interactions between neighbouring living cells and between cells and solid substrates. Lately, analogous…
Cells offer numerous inspiring examples where proteins and membranes combine to form complex structures that are key to intracellular compartmentalization, cargo transport, and specialization of cell morphology. Despite this wealth of…
Changes in the geometry and topology of self-assembled membranes underlie diverse processes across cellular biology and engineering. Similar to lipid bilayers, monolayer colloidal membranes have in-plane fluid-like dynamics and out-of-plane…
The membrane curvature of cells and intracellular compartments continuously adapts to enable cells to perform vital functions, from cell division to signal trafficking. Understanding how membrane geometry affects these processes in vivo is…
The presence of membrane tubules in living cells is essential to many biological processes. In cells, one mechanism to form nanosized lipid tubules is via molecular motor induced bilayer extraction. In this paper, we describe a simple…
We present a simple coarse-grained bead-and-spring model for lipid bilayers. The system has been developed to reproduce the main (gel-liquid) transition of biological membranes on intermediate length scales of a couple of nanometres and is…
Temperature controlled Polarization Modulation Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy (PM-NSOM) measurements of a single supported $L_{\beta^{\prime}}$ 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DPPC) lipid bilayer are presented. The…
We review recent computer simulation studies of undulating lipid bilayers. Theoretical interpretations of such fluctuating membranes are most commonly based on generalized Helfrich-type elastic models, with additional contributions of local…
Conical inclusions in a lipid bilayer generate an overall spontaneous curvature of the membrane that depends on concentration and geometry of the inclusions. Examples are integral and attached membrane proteins, viruses, and lipid domains.…
We propose a methodology to measure the mechanical properties of membranes from their fluctuations and apply this to optical microscopy measurements of giant unilamellar vesicles of lipids. We analyze the effect of the projection of thermal…
From the perspective of physical properties, the cell membrane is an exotic two-dimensional material that has a dual nature: it exhibits characteristics of fluids, i.e., lipid molecules show lateral diffusion, while also demonstrating…