Related papers: Mixing small proteins with lipids and cholesterol
For some time now, we have been using a FRET-based strategy to make high-resolution studies of phase behavior in ternary lipid-raft membrane mixtures. Our FRET experiments can be carried out on ordinary, polydisperse multilamellar vesicle…
Monolayer spontaneous curvatures for cholesterol, DOPE, POPE, DOPC, DPPC, DSPC, POPC, SOPC, and egg sphingomyelin were obtained using small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) on inverted hexagonal phases (HII). Spontaneous curvatures of bilayer…
Proteins and nucleic acids can spontaneously self-assemble into membraneless droplet-like compartments, both in vitro and in vivo. A key component of these droplets are multi-valent proteins that possess several adhesive domains with…
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…
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…
We address the relationship between membrane microheterogeneity and anomalous subdiffusion in cell membranes by carrying out Monte Carlo simulations of two-component lipid membranes. We find that near-critical fluctuations in the membrane…
Rafts, or functional domains, are transient nano- or mesoscopic structures in the plasma membrane and are thought to be essential for many cellular processes such as signal transduction, adhesion, trafficking and lipid/protein sorting.…
By means of atomistic molecular dynamics simulations, we study cholesterol-DPPC (dipalmitoyl phosphatidylcholine) bilayers of different composition, from pure DPPC bilayers to a 1:1 mixture of DPPC and cholesterol. The lateral-pressure…
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…
We study the phase behavior of multicomponent lipid bilayer vesicles that can exhibit intriguing morphological patterns and lateral phase separation. We use a modified Landau-Ginzburg model capable of describing spatially uniform phases,…
The phase behavior of membrane proteins stems from a complex synergy with the amphiphilic molecules required for their solubilization. We show that ionization of a pH-sensitive surfactant, LDAO, bound to a bacterial photosynthetic protein,…
The self-organization of proteins into enriched compartments and the formation of complex patterns are crucial processes for life on the cellular level. Liquid-liquid phase separation is one mechanism for forming such enriched compartments.…
We consider the formation of finite-size domains in lipid bilayers consisting of saturated and hybrid lipids. First, we describe a monolayer model that includes a coupling between a compositional scalar field and a two-dimensional vectorial…
Endeavoring toward a transferable, predictive coarse-grained explicit-chain model for biomolecular condensates underlain by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), we conducted multiple-chain simulations of the N-terminal intrinsically…
Multicomponent lipid mixtures exhibit complex phase behavior, including coexistence of nanoscopic fluid phases in ternary mixtures mimicking the composition of the outer leaflet of mammalian plasma membrane. The physical mechanisms…
A reduced model, which can fold both helix and sheet structures, is proposed to study the problem of protein folding. The goal of this model is to find an unbiased effective potential that has included the effects of water and at the same…
Membrane phase-separation is a mechanism that biological membranes often use to locally concentrate specific lipid species in order to organize diverse membrane processes. Phase separation has also been explored as a tool for the design of…
Protein folding cooperativity is defined by the nature of the finite-size thermodynamic transition exhibited upon folding: two-state transitions show a free energy barrier between the folded and unfolded ensembles, while downhill folding is…
A protein's function depends critically on its conformational ensemble, a collection of energy weighted structures whose balance depends on temperature and environment. Though recent deep learning (DL) methods have substantially advanced…
We use a coarse-grained molecular model to study the self-assembly process of complexes of cationic and neutral lipids with DNA molecules ("lipoplexes") - a promising nonviral carrier of DNA for gene therapy. We identify the resulting…