Related papers: The excitable fluid mosaic
A bio tissue model consisting of multilayer spherical cells including four nested radial domains (nucleus, nuclear membrane, cytoplasm and plasma membrane) is worked out to derive the cell heating dynamics in presence of membrane…
Water molecules play an important role in providing unique environments for biological reactions on cell membranes. It is widely believed that water molecules form bridges that connect lipid molecules and stabilize cell membranes. Using…
In hydrodynamic descriptions of lipid bilayers, the membrane is often approximated as being impermeable to the surrounding, solute-containing fluid. However, biological and in vitro lipid membranes are influenced by their permeability and…
An accurate description of the structure and dynamics of interfacial water is essential for phospholipid membranes, since it determines their function and their interaction with other molecules. Here we consider water confined in stacked…
Confinement can modify the dynamics, the thermodynamics and the structural properties of liquid water, the prototypical anomalous liquid. By considering a general anomalous liquid, suitable for globular proteins, colloids or liquid metals,…
During the melting transition of dimyristoyl phosphatidylglycerol (DMPG), the order of the lipid chains and the three-dimensional, vesicular structural arrangement change simultaneously. These changes result in peculiar heat capacity…
This computational experiment demonstrates that chain melting in lipids is a molecular process. BOMD is certainly the best method to reproduce such dynamics properties, since the electronic contributions to the various molecular structures…
How internal forces are transduced into motion through soft, fluid membranes remains a fundamental question in the study of active systems. To investigate this coupling, we develop a minimal system consisting of a single ferromagnetic…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Liquid water is not only of obvious importance but also extremely intriguing, displaying many anomalies that still challenge our understanding of such an a priori simple system. The same is true when looking at nanoconfined water: The…
Biological membranes are known to form various structural motifs, from lipid bilayers to tubular filaments and networks facilitating e.g. adhesion and cell-cell communication. To understand the biophysical processes underpinning lipid-lipid…
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 examine the budding of a nanoscale particle through a lipid bilayer using molecular dynamics simulations, free energy calculations, and an elastic theory, with the aim of determining the extent to which equilibrium elasticity theory can…
Using analytical calculations and computer simulations we consider both the lateral diffusion of a membrane protein and the fluctuation spectrum of the membrane in which the protein is embedded. The membrane protein interacts with the…
Experiments and theory have shown that cell monolayers and epithelial tissues exhibit solid-liquid and glass-liquid transitions. These transitions are biologically relevant to our understanding of embryonic development, wound healing, and…
Relatively short peptides, such as toxins and antimicrobial-peptides, are known to insert themselves into cell membranes. On the basis of simple bead-spring models for the membrane lipids, the peptide, and water, detailed processes of the…
We study the dynamics of elastic interfaces-membranes-immersed in thermally excited fluids. The work contains three components: the development of a numerical method, a purely theoretical approach, and numerical simulation. In developing a…
We consider a fluid of $d$-dimensional spherical particles interacting via a pair potential $\phi(r)$ which takes a finite value $\epsilon$ if the two spheres are overlapped ($r<\sigma$) and 0 otherwise. This penetrable-sphere model has…
We present a simple, and physically motivated, coarse-grained model of a lipid bilayer, suited for micron scale computer simulations. Each ~25 nm^2 patch of bilayer is represented by a spherical particle. Mimicking forces of hydrophobic…
An equilibrated model glass-forming liquid is studied by mapping successive configurations produced by molecular dynamics simulation onto a time series of inherent structures (local minima in the potential energy). Using this ``inherent…