Related papers: Molecular dynamics simulation of polymer insertion…
Cellular membranes are elastic lipid bilayers that contain a variety of proteins, including ion channels, receptors, and scaffolding proteins. These proteins are known to diffuse in the plane of the membrane and to influence the bending of…
The hydrodynamic interactions of a suspension of self-propelled particles are studied using a direct numerical simulation method which simultaneously solves for the host fluid and the swimming particles. A modified version of the "Smoothed…
The cell membrane is inherently asymmetric and heterogeneous in its composition, a feature that is crucial for its function. Using atomistic molecular dynamics simulations, the physical properties of a 3-component asymmetric mixed lipid…
Extensive microscopic molecular dynamics simulations have been performed to study the effects of short-chain alcohols, methanol and ethanol, on two different fully hydrated lipid bilayer systems in the fluid phase at 323 K. It is found that…
Multivalent interactions between deformable mesoscopic units are ubiquitous in biology, where membrane macromolecules mediate the interactions between neighbouring living cells and between cells and solid substrates. Lately, analogous…
The physicochemical properties of lipid bilayers (membranes) are closely associated with various cellular functions and are often evaluated using absorption and fluorescence spectroscopies. For instance, by employing fluorescent probes that…
The dynamic behavior of a partially wetting polymer droplet driven over a nanostructured interface is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider the bead-spring model to represent a polymeric liquid that partially wets a…
Using a microfluidic trap, we study the behavior of individual phospholipid vesicles in contact with fatty acids. We show that spontaneous fatty acids insertion inside the bilayer is controlled by the vesicle size, osmotic pressure…
Cationic lipid membranes are known to form compact complexes with DNA and to be effective as gene delivery agents both in vitro and in vivo. Here we employ molecular dynamics simulations for a detailed atomistic study of lipid bilayers…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Biological membranes are complex, dynamic structures essential for cellular compartmentalization, signaling, and mechanical integrity. The molecular organization of eukaryotic membranes has been extensively studied, including the lipid…
Response of lipid bilayers to external mechanical stimuli is an active area of research with implications for fundamental and synthetic cell biology. However, there is a lack of tools for systematically imposing mechanical strains and…
Lipid membranes have complex compositions and modeling the thermodynamic properties of multi-component lipid systems remains a remote goal. In this work we attempt to describe the thermodynamics of binary lipid mixtures by mapping…
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…
A recently introduced numerical scheme for calculating self-diffusion coefficients of solid objects embedded in lipid bilayer membranes is extended to enable calculation of hydrodynamic interactions between multiple objects. The method is…
Whether live cell membranes show miscibility phase transitions (MPTs), and if so, how they fluctuate near the transitions remain outstanding unresolved issues in physics and biology alike. Motivated by these questions we construct a generic…
Animal cells are both encapsulated and subdivided by lipid bilayer membranes. Beyond just acting as boundaries, these membranes' shapes influence the function of cells and their compartments. Physically, membranes are two-dimensional fluids…
Coarse-grained model for saturated (DCPC, DLPC, DMPC, DPPC, DSPC) and unsaturated (POPC, DOPC) phospholipids is introduced within the Single Chain Mean Field theory. A single set of parameters adjusted for DMPC bilayers gives an adequate…
Field-theoretical method is proposed, that yields analytical expression for lateral pressure distribution across hydrophobic core of a bilayer lipid membrane. Lipid molecule, repelling entropicaly surrounding neighbors, is modeled as a…
Viscosity is a key property of cell membranes that controls mobility of embedded proteins and membrane remodeling. Measuring it is challenging because existing approaches involve complex experimental designs and/or models, and the…