Appearing as a computational microscope, MD simulation can ‘zoom in’ to atomic resolution to assess detailed interactions of a membrane protein with its surrounding lipids, which play important roles in the stability and function of such proteins. This study has employed the molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, to determine the effect of added DMPC or DMTAP molecules on the structure of D...

Supported lipid bilayers (SLB) are important for the study of membrane-based phenomena and as coatings for biosensors. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental lack of understanding of the process by which they form from vesicles in solution. We report insights into the mechanism of SLB formation by vesicle adsorption using temperature-controlled time-resolved fluorescence microscopy at low vesicle...

Many drugs and other small molecules used to modulate biological function are amphiphiles that adsorb at the bilayer/solution interface and thereby alter lipid bilayer properties. This is important because membrane proteins are energetically coupled to their host bilayer by hydrophobic interactions. Changes in bilayer properties thus alter membrane protein function, which provides an indirect w...

Cell membranes are composed of a lipid bilayer, containing proteins that span the bilayer and/or interact with the lipids on either side of the two leaflets. Although recent advances in lipid analytics show that membranes in eukaryotic cells contain hundreds of different lipid species, the function of this lipid diversity remains enigmatic. The basic structure of cell membranes is the lipid bil...

Complete determination of a membrane protein structure requires knowledge of the protein position within the lipid bilayer. As the number of determined structures of membrane proteins increases so does the need for computational methods which predict their position in the lipid bilayer. Here we present a coarse-grained molecular dynamics approach to lipid bilayer self-assembly around membrane p...

BACKGROUND Lipid-based dispersion of nanoparticles provides a biologically inspired route to designing therapeutic agents and a means of reducing nanoparticle toxicity. Little is currently known on how the presence of nanoparticles influences lipid vesicle stability and bilayer phase behavior. In this work, the formation of aqueous lipid/nanoparticle assemblies (LNAs) consisting of hydrophobic ...

The folding mechanisms of integral membrane proteins have largely eluded detailed study. This is owing to the inherent difficulties in folding these hydrophobic proteins in vitro, which, in turn, reflects the often apparently insurmountable problem of mimicking the natural membrane bilayer with lipid or detergent mixtures. There is, however, a large body of information on lipid properties and, ...

Lipid bilayers can be induced to adhere to each other by molecular mediators, and, depending on the lipid composition, such adhesion can lead to merging of the contacting monolayers in a process known as hemifusion. Such bilayer-bilayer reactions have never been systematically studied. In the course of our studies of membrane-active molecules, we encountered such reactions. We believe that they...

This paper deals with the effect of different size gold nanoparticles on the fluidity of lipid membrane at different regions of the bilayer. To investigate this, we have considered significantly large bilayer leaflets and incorporated only one nanoparticle each time, which was subjected to all atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. We have observed that, lipid molecules located near to the g...

The 2H NMR transverse relaxation rates of a deuterated phospholipid bilayer reflect slow motions in the bilayer membrane. A study of dimyristoyl lecithin specifically deuterated at several positions of the hydrocarbon chains indicates that these motions are cooperative and are confined to the hydrocarbon chains of the lipid bilayer. However, lipid head group interactions do play an important ro...