Related papers: Molecular theory of hydrophobic mismatch between l…
In this study, we investigate interactions of extended conformations of homodimeric peptides made of small (glycine or alanine) and large hydrophobic (valine or leucine) sidechains using all-atom molecular dynamics simulations to decipher…
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…
Abeta is a disordered peptide central to Alzheimer's Disease. Aggregation of Abeta has been widely explored, but its molecular crowding less so. The synaptic cleft where Abeta locates only holds 60-70 water molecules along its width. We…
From extensive Monte Carlo simulations of a Larson model of perfectly periodic heteropolymers (PHP) in water a striking stiffening is observed as the period of the alternating hydrophobic and hydrophilic blocks is shortened. At short period…
Hydrophobic hydration plays a crucial role in self-assembly processes over multiple length-scales, but the extrapolation of molecular-scale models to larger length-scale hydration phenomena is sometimes not warranted. Scaled-particle…
The lifetime of a hydrogen bond between water and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is found to be considerably longer than that between two water molecules in the neat water. This is counter-intuitive because the charge on the oxygen in DMSO is…
We introduce a microscopic model of a lipid with a charged headgroup and flexible hydrophobic tails, a neutral solvent, and counter ions. Short-ranged interactions between hydrophilic and hydrophobic moieties are included as are the Coulomb…
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for physicists, since they…
We study membrane-protein interactions and membrane-mediated protein-protein interactions by Monte Carlo simulations of a generic coarse-grained model for lipid bilayers with cylindrical hydrophobic inclusions. The strength of the…
The conformation and the phase diagram of a membrane protein are investigated via grand canonical ensemble approach using a homopolymer model. We discuss the nature and pathway of $\alpha$-helix integration into the membrane that results…
We present a probabilistic approach to water-water hydrogen bonding that allows one to obtain an analytic expression for the number of bonds per water molecule as a function of both its distance to a hydrophobic particle and hydrophobe…
We present results from extensive molecular dynamics simulations of collapse transitions of hydrophobic polymers in explicit water focused on understanding effects of lengthscale of the hydrophobic surface and of attractive interactions on…
Peptide compounds demonstrate considerable potential as therapeutic agents due to their high target affinity and low toxicity, yet their drug development is constrained by their low membrane permeability. Molecular weight and peptide length…
The activity of cell membrane inclusions (such as ion channels) is influenced by the host lipid membrane, to which they are elastically coupled. This coupling concerns the hydrophobic thickness of the bilayer (imposed by the length of the…
We consider a model of bilayer lipid membrane with interdigitation, in which the lipid tails of the opposite monolayers interpenetrate. The interdigitation is modeled by linking tails of the hydrophobic chains in the opposite monolayers…
A theoretical model for the effect of water hydrogen bonding on the thermodynamics of hydrophobic hydration is proposed as a combination of the classical density functional theory with the recently developed probabilistic approach to water…
A microscopic model of the lipid membrane is constructed that provides analytically tractable description of the physical mechanism of the first order liquid-gel phase transition. We demonstrate that liquid-gel phase transition is…
The collective motion of membrane lipids over hundred of nanometers and nanoseconds is essential for the formation of submicron complexes of lipids and proteins in the cell membrane. These dynamics are difficult to access experimentally and…
We study the deformation of a lipid membrane in response to a local pH modification. Experimentally, a basic solution is microinjected close to a giant unilamellar vesicle. A local deformation appears in the zone of the membrane that is…
Hydrophobic molecules such as oils and certain drugs can be encapsulated between the two leaflets of an amphiphilic bilayer in both lipid and polymer systems. We investigate the case where the hydrophobic molecules are incompatible with the…