Related papers: Lipid Lateral Diffusion: Mechanisms and Modulators
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,…
We consider how membrane fluctuations can modify the miscibility of lipid mixtures, that is to say how the phase diagram of a boundary-constrained membrane is modified when the membrane is allowed to fluctuate freely in the case of zero…
This chapter summarizes several approaches combining theory, simulation and experiment that aim for a better understanding of phenomena in lipid bilayers and membrane protein systems, covering topics such as lipid rafts, membrane mediated…
Cell plasma membranes display a dramatically rich structural complexity characterized by functional sub-wavelength domains with specific lipid and protein composition. Under favorable experimental conditions, patterned morphologies can also…
The human tear film (TF) is thin multilayer fluid film that is critical for clear vision and ocular surface health. Its dynamics are strongly affected by a floating lipid layer and, in health, that layer slows evaporation and helps create a…
We study lipid translocation ("flip-flop") between the leaflets of a planar lipid bilayer with transition path sampling (TPS). Rare flip-flops compete with biological machineries that actively establish asymmetric lipid compositions.…
The propagation of sound waves on lipid monolayers supported on water has been studied during the melting transition. Since changes in volume, area, and compressibility in lipid membranes have biological relevance, the observed sound…
Biological water is an ionic solution containing both monovalent and divalent ions. However, the effects of divalent ions on the dynamics of biological water remain largely unknown. Here, we investigate how the transport dynamics of water…
Diffusion in biological membranes is seldom simply Brownian motion; instead, the rate of diffusion is dependent on the timescale of observation and so is often described as anomalous. In order to help better understand this phenomenon,…
By performing molecular dynamics simulations with up to 132 million coarse-grained particles in half-micron sized boxes, we show that hydrodynamics quantitatively explains the finite-size effects on diffusion of lipids, proteins, and carbon…
Cell spreading is investigated at various scales in order to understand motility of living cells which is essential for a range of physiological activities in higher organisms as well as in microbes. At a microscopic scale, it has been seen…
Nanoscale membrane assemblies of sphingolipids, cholesterol, and certain proteins, also known as lipid rafts, play a crucial role in facilitating a broad range of important cell functions. Whereas on living cell membranes lipid rafts have…
We consider membranes interacting via short, intermediate and long stickers. The effects of the intermediate stickers on the lateral phase separation of the membranes are studied via mean-field approximation. The critical potential depth of…
Diffusion is a fundamental phenomenon that occurs ubiquitously in nature and remains the subject of continuous research interest. Understanding diffusion is a key to understanding leaving systems. In this Chapter, I discuss diffusion of…
The Stratum Corneum (SC), the outermost layer of skin, comprises rigid corneocytes (keratin filled dead cells) in a specialized lipid matrix. The continuous lipid matrix provides the main barrier against uncontrolled water loss and invasion…
Membrane tension is an acknowledged regulator of a wide array of cell functions; however, whether it acts locally or globally in different contexts remains debated. Recent experiments that locally perturb tension and measure the response…
Water molecules confined between biological membranes exhibit a distinctive non-Gaussian displacement distribution, far different from bulk water. Here, we introduce a new transport equation for water molecules in the intermembrane space,…
The diffusion of molecules (penetrants) of variable size, shape, and chemistry through dense crosslinked polymer networks is a fundamental scientific problem that is broadly relevant in materials, polymer, physical and biological chemistry.…
We propose a model describing liquid-solid phase coexistence in mixed lipid membranes by including explicitly the occurrence of a rippled phase. For a single component membrane, we employ a previous model in which the membrane thickness is…
Artificial bilayer lipid membranes (BLMs), along with patch-clamped membranes, are frequently used for functional analyses of membrane proteins. In both methods, the electric properties of membranes are characterized by only one parameter,…