Related papers: Pressure-dependent adhesion between solid-supporte…
It was recently discovered that friction between surfaces bearing phosphatidylcholine (PC) lipid bilayers can be increased by two orders of magnitude or more via an externally-applied electric field, and that this increase is fully…
It is well known that lipid membranes respond to a threshold transmembrane electric field through a reversible mechanism called electroporation, where hydrophilic water pores form across the membrane, an effect widely used in biological…
Transient electric fields across cell bilayer membranes can lead to electroporation, as well as to cell fusion, and have been extensively studied. We find that transmembrane electric fields similar to those in cells can lead to a massive,…
Water-phospholipid interactions at the lipid bilayer/water interfaces are of essential importance for the dynamics, stability and function of biological membrane, and are also strongly associated with numerous biological processes at the…
Cell-cell contacts in tissues are continuously subject to mechanical forces due to homeostatic pressure and active cytoskeleton dynamics. While much is known about the molecular pathways of adhesion, the role of mechanics is less well…
We model cyclic voltammetry experiments on supported lipid films where a non-trivial dependence of the capacitance on the applied voltage is observed. Previously, based on a mean-field treatment of the Flory-Huggins type, under 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…
For many biotechnological applications it would be useful to better understand the effects produced by electric fields on lipid membranes. This review discusses several aspects of the electrostatic properties of a planar lipid membrane with…
Contrary to existing theoretical models, experimental evidence points out that electroporation (membrane defect formation under external electric fields) starts to occur within the range of transmembrane voltages that cells may routinely…
We report a new and facile method for measuring edge tensions of lipid membranes. The approach is based on electroporation of giant unilamellar vesicles and analysis of the pore closure dynamics. We applied this method to evaluate the edge…
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 phase separation in lipid bilayers that include negatively charged lipids is examined experimentally. We observed phase-separated structures and determined the membrane miscibility temperatures in several binary and ternary lipid…
We present real-time observations by confocal microscopy of the dynamic behavior of multilamellar vesicles (MLVs), composed of charged synthetic lipids, when put in contact with oppositely charged polyelectrolyte (PE) molecules. We find…
Dynamic lateral transport of lipids, proteins, and self-assembled structures in biomembranes plays crucial roles in diverse cellular processes. In this study, we perform a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation on a vesicle composed…
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…
A cell membrane can be simply regarded as composite material consisting of lipid bilayer, membrane cytoskeleton beneath lipid bilayer, and proteins embedded in lipid bilayer and linked with membrane cytoskeleton if one only concerns its…
We generalize the predictions for attractions between over-all neutral surfaces induced by charge fluctuations/correlations to non-uniform systems that include dielectric discontinuities, as is the case for mixed charged lipid membranes in…
Lipid bilayer membranes are the fundamental biological barriers that permit life. The bilayer dynamics largely participates in orchestrating cellular workings and is characterized by substantial stability together with extreme plasticity…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Understanding how lipid bilayers respond to pressure is essential for interpreting the coupling between membrane proteins and their native environments. Here, we use all-atom molecular dynamics to examine the pressure-temperature behavior…