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Can the presence of molecular-tilt order significantly affect the shapes of lipid bilayer membranes, particularly membrane shapes with narrow necks? Motivated by the propensity for tilt order and the common occurrence of narrow necks in the…
Polyhedral vesicles with a large bending modulus of the membrane such as the gel phase lipid membrane were studied using a Brownian dynamics simulation. The vesicles exhibit various polyhedral morphologies such as tetrahedron and cube…
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…
The deformability of vesicles critically influences their engulfment by lipid membranes, a process central to endocytosis, viral entry, drug delivery, and intercellular transport. While theoretical models have long predicted this influence,…
Morphological transitions of phase separation associated with the asymmetry of lipid composition were investigated using micrometer-sized vesicles of lipid bilayers made from a lipid mixture. The complete macro-phase-separated morphology…
Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…
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…
Conical inclusions in a lipid bilayer generate an overall spontaneous curvature of the membrane that depends on concentration and geometry of the inclusions. Examples are integral and attached membrane proteins, viruses, and lipid domains.…
Intracellular protein patterns regulate a variety of vital cellular processes such as cell division and motility, which often involve dynamic changes of cell shape. These changes in cell shape may in turn affect the dynamics of…
Continuum or hybrid modeling of bilayer membrane morphological dynamics induced by embedded proteins necessitates the identification of protein-membrane interfaces and coupling of deformations of two surfaces. In this article we developed…
The intricate shapes of biological membranes such as tubules and membrane stacks are induced by proteins. In this article, we systematically investigate the membrane shapes induced by arc-shaped scaffolds such as proteins and protein…
A phenomenological Landau elasticity for the shape, dilation, and lipid-tilt of bilayer membranes is developed. The shape mode couples with the sum of the monolayers' tilt, while the dilation mode couples with the difference of the…
We consider a model of bilayer lipid membrane with bola-lipids. The bola-lipid is modeled by linking tails of the hydrophobic chains in the opposite monolayers within bilayer as a first approximation. A number of thermodynamical…
Bilayer membranes self-assembled from amphiphilic molecules such as lipids, surfactants and block copolymers are ubiquitous in biological and physiochemical systems. The shape and structure of bilayer membranes depend crucially on their…
We review recent computer simulation studies of undulating lipid bilayers. Theoretical interpretations of such fluctuating membranes are most commonly based on generalized Helfrich-type elastic models, with additional contributions of local…
In the framework of a phase field model of a single cell crawling on a substrate, we investigate how the properties of the cell membrane affect the shape and motility of the cell. Since the membrane influences the cell dynamics on multiple…
In cell extrusion, a cell embedded in an epithelial monolayer loses its apical or basal surface and is subsequently squeezed out of the monolayer by neighboring cells. Cell extrusions occur during apoptosis, epithelial-mesenchymal…
Cell extrusion is an essential mechanism for controlling cell density in epithelial tissues. Another essential element of epithelia is curvature, which is required to achieve complex shapes, like in the lung or intestine. Here we introduce…
We investigate pores in fluid membranes by molecular dynamics simulations of an amphiphile-solvent mixture, using a molecular coarse-grained model. The amphiphilic membranes self-assemble into a lamellar stack of amphiphilic bilayers…
Many lipid membrane-mediated transport processes--such as mechanically-gated channel activation and solute transport--involve structural and dynamical features on membrane thickness length scales. Most existing membrane models, however,…