The effect of interaction between K+ ions and gramicidin D on the lecithin membrane interfacial tension

Interfacial tension of bilayer lipid membranes

Interfacial tension is an important characteristic of a biological membrane because it determines its rigidity, thus affecting its stability. It is affected by factors such as medium pH and by the presence of certain substances, for example cholesterol, other lipids, fatty acids, amines, amino acids, or proteins, incorporated in the lipid bilayer. Here, the effects of various parameters to on interfacial tension values of bilayer lipid membranes are discussed.

The mathematically derived and experimentally confirmed results presented in this paper are of importance to the interpretation of phenomena occurring in lipid bilayers. These results can lead to a better understanding of the physical properties of biological membranes. The simple interfacial tension method proposed herein may be successfully used to determine the interfacial tension values of 1:1 lipid-lipid, lipid-cholesterol, lipid-fatty acid, lipid-amine, and lipid-amino acid systems.

'KMC-TDGL'-a coarse-grained methodology for simulating interfacial dynamics in complex fluids: application to protein-mediated membrane processes

In this article, we describe a new multiscale simulation algorithm (which we term the 'KMC-TDGL' method) applicable for the description of equilibrium and dynamic processes associated with a particular class of complex fluids with nanoscale inclusions, namely, biological membranes mediated by membrane-associating and membrane-bound proteins. We adopt a novel strategy of integrating two different phenomenological approaches, namely, a field theoretic (continuum) description for the membrane dynamics given by the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equation and a random walk on a discretized lattice description for protein diffusion dynamics. We illustrate that this integrated approach results in a unified description of protein-mediated membrane dynamics.