Related papers: Flexible Lipid Bilayers in Implicit Solvent
Lipid bilayer membranes are the fundamental biological barriers that permit life. The bilayer dynamics largely participates in orchestrating cellular workings and is characterized by substantial stability together with extreme plasticity…
Biomembranes, primarily composed of lipid bilayers, are not merely passive barriers but dynamic and complex materials whose shapes are governed by the principles of soft matter physics. This review explores the shape problem in biomembranes…
We found theoretically that competition between ~Kq^4 and ~Qq^2 terms in the Fourier transformed conformational energy of a single lipid chain, in combination with inter-chain entropic repulsion in the hydrophobic part of the lipid…
We use coarse-grained Monte Carlo simulations to study the elastic properties of charged membranes in solutions of monovalent and pentavalent counterions. The simulation results of the two cases reveal trends opposite to each other. The…
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…
We investigate the interaction between highly charged lipid bilayers in the presence of monovalent counterions. Neutron and X-ray reflectivity experiments show that the water layer between like-charged bilayers is thinner than for…
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…
Highly oriented solid-supported lipid membranes in stacks of controlled number $N \simeq 16$ (oligo-membranes) have been prepared by spin-coating using the uncharged lipid model system 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DMPC). The…
The interpretation electrical phenomena in biomembranes is usually based on the assumption that the experimentally found discrete ion conduction events are due to a particular class of proteins called ion channels while the lipid membrane…
The membrane curvature of cells and intracellular compartments continuously adapts to enable cells to perform vital functions, from cell division to signal trafficking. Understanding how membrane geometry affects these processes in vivo is…
In hydrodynamic descriptions of lipid bilayers, the membrane is often approximated as being impermeable to the surrounding, solute-containing fluid. However, biological and in vitro lipid membranes are influenced by their permeability and…
The bending rigidity $k_c$ of bilayer vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers has been measured using single and dual-micropipet techniques. These copolymers are nearly a factor of 5 greater in hydrophobic membrane…
We develop theory and computational methods to investigate particle inclusions embedded within curved lipid bilayer membranes. We consider the case of spherical lipid vesicles where inclusion particles are coupled through (i) intramembrane…
The $L_\alpha$ phase of lipid bilayers is a fluid self-assembled state, key to the formulation of cosmetics, detergents and pharmaceutics. Despite having been extensively scrutinized in self-assembled phospholipid or surfactant bilayers,…
We propose a very simple but realistic enough model which allows to include a large number of molecules in molecular dynamics MD simulations of these bilayers, but nevertheless taking into account molecular charge distributions, flexible…
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.…
We present a simple and computationally efficient coarse-grained and solvent-free model for simulating lipid bilayer membranes. In order to be used in concert with particle-based reaction-diffusion simulations, the model is purely based on…
Monte Carlo simulations using an explicit solvent model indicate a new pathway for translocation of a polymer chain through a lipid bilayer. We consider a polymer chain composed of repeat units with a given hydrophobicity and a…
Coarse-grained continuous descriptions for lipid bilayers are typically based on minimizing the Helfrich energy. Such models consider the fluid properties of these structures only implicitly and have been shown to nicely reproduce…
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…