Molecular Mechanisms of Water and Solute Transport across Archaebacterial Lipid Membranes

Lipid distribution and transport across cellular membranes.

In eukaryotic cells, the membranes of different intracellular organelles have different lipid composition, and various biomembranes show an asymmetric distribution of lipid types across the membrane bilayer. Membrane lipid organization reflects a dynamic equilibrium of lipids moving across the bilayer in both directions. In this review, we summarize data supporting the role of specific membrane...

Molecular dynamics of water transport through membranes: Water from solvent to solute

An application of Molecular Dynamics computer simulation (MD) to the process of transport of water through a lipid bilayer membrane is described. The permeation process is far too slow to be modeled by straightforward MD. In stead the inverse of the permeability coefficient is expressed as an integral over a local permeation resistance, which itself is inversely proportional both to the local d...

Dynamics of water and solute transport in polymeric reverse osmosis membranes via molecular dynamics simulations

The Ångström-scale transport characteristics of water and six different solutes, methanol, ethanol, 2propanol, urea, Na+, and Cl-, were studied for a polymeric reverse osmosis (RO) membrane, FT-30, using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations. Results indicate that water transport increases with an increasing fraction of percolated free volume, or water-accessible open space, in ...

Quantitative visualization of passive transport across bilayer lipid membranes.

The ability to predict and interpret membrane permeation coefficients is of critical importance, particularly because passive transport is crucial for the effective delivery of many pharmaceutical agents to intracellular targets. We present a method for the quantitative measurement of the permeation coefficients of protonophores by using laser confocal scanning microscopy coupled to microelectr...

Active Solute Transport across Frog