Related papers: Mixing small proteins with lipids and cholesterol
Much of our understanding of the physical properties of raft domains in biological membranes, and some insight into the mechanisms underlying their formation stem from atomistic simulations of simple model systems, especially ternary…
Mixtures of lipids and cholesterol are commonly used as model systems for studying the formation of liquid-ordered ($L_o$) domains in heterogeneous biological membranes. The simplest model system exhibiting coexistence between $L_o$ domains…
Membrane proteins often form dimers and higher-order oligomers whose stability and spatial organization depend sensitively on their lipid environment. To investigate the physical principles underlying this coupling, we employ a lattice…
Cholesterol (CHOL) is one of the most important components of plasma membranes of higher cells and one of the main factors for the formation of (nano)domains. In this work, molecular dynamics simulations of mixtures of CHOL with DPPC…
In an effort to understand ``rafts'' in biological membranes, we propose phenomenological models for saturated and unsaturated lipid mixtures, and lipid-cholesterol mixtures. We consider simple couplings between the local composition and…
Reconstituted nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) exhibit significant gain-of-function upon addition of cholesterol to reconstitution mixtures, and cholesterol affects organization of nAChRs within domain-forming membranes, but…
We use a lattice model of a ternary mixture containing saturated and unsaturated lipids with cholesterol (Chol), to study the structural properties characterizing the coexistence between the liquid-disordered and liquid-ordered phases.…
We present a phenomenological theory for the phase behavior of ternary mixtures of cholesterol and saturated and unsaturated lipids, one which describes both liquid and gel phases, and illuminates the mechanism of the behavior. In a binary…
We employ a molecular model to study a ternary mixture of saturated lipid, with tails of sixteen carbons, a mono unsaturated lipid with tails of eighteen carbons, and cholesterol. The model, solved within mean-field theory, produces several…
By means of lattice-based Monte Carlo simulations, we address properties of two-component lipid membranes on the experimentally relevant spatial scales of order of a micrometer and time intervals of order of a second, using DMPC/DSPC lipid…
A molecular model is proposed of a bilayer consisting of fully saturated DPPC and mono unsaturated DOPC. The model not only encompasses the constant density within the hydrophobic core of the bilayer, but also the tendency of chain segments…
The spatio-temporal organization of proteins and the associated morphological changes in membranes are of importance in cell signaling. Several mechanisms that promote the aggregation of proteins at low cell surface concentrations have been…
We investigated the phase separation of dioleoylphosphatidylserine (DOPS) and dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) in giant unilamellar vesicles in hypotonic solution using fluorescence and confocal laser scanning microscopy. Although…
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 propose a model describing the phase behavior of two-component membranes consisting of binary mixtures of electrically charged and neutral lipids. We take into account the structural phase transition (main-transition) of the hydrocarbon…
Cholesterol (CHOL) drives lipid segregation and is thus a key player for the formation of lipid rafts and followingly for the ability of a cell to, e.g., enable selective agglomeration of proteins. The lipid segregation is driven by…
Simulation of a multicomponent lipid bilayer having a fixed percentage of cholesterol is done to study phase transition leading to domain formation. The concept of random lattice has been used in simulation to account for the coupling…
We report on atomistic simulations of DPPC lipid monolayers using the CHARMM36 lipid force field and four-point OPC water model. The entire two-phase region where domains of the `liquid-condensed' (LC) phase coexist with domains of the…
A physical scenario accounting for the existence of size-limited submicrometric domains in cell membranes is proposed. It is based on the numerical investigation of the counterpart, in lipidic membranes where proteins are diffusing, of the…
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.…