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The basic property of biomembranes

An explanation for the geometric progression of vesicles

Molecular Biology Reports volume 36, pages 959–964 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

In order to explain the experimentally obtained results with biomembranes it has been assumed, that the diameter of all vesicles, defined by a lipid bilayer, form a perfect crystal. Later on it appeared that biomembranes are liquid crystals. Nevertheless already with biomembranes as crystals it was possible to calculate the diameters of all existing vesicles. As shown in the present paper, the results with liquid crystals were identical to those with a perfect crystal-model. Here I demonstrate that the geometric progression of the diameters of vesicles of biomembranes is based on the entropy of the lipids and it is shown that the diameters of biomembranes fit four geometric series. The surface areas of these series of biomembranes can be approximated by the two geometric series published previously.

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Acknowledgements

First of all I have to thank Professor H. Bloemendal (Department of Biochemistry, University of Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9101, 6500, HB Nijmegen, Netherlands) because he introduced me in the field of analytical centrifugation and secondly for his help in the preparation of this paper. I am very grateful to Professor F.W. Wiegel (Department of Applied Physics, Twente University of Technology, P.O. Box 217, 7500-AE Enschede, The Netherlands) for his help in the formulation of the extremely important part, dealing with the theory of entropy developed by Ludwig Boltzmann. I want to thank Professor Zhong-can, Ou-yang from Peking, for drawing my attention in 2003 to liquid crystals as models for biomembranes. I want to thank Dr U. de Groot (not an expert in biosciences) for telling me, that biomembranes could be liquid crystals.

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  1. Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Willy S. Bont

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  1. Willy S. Bont
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Correspondence to Willy S. Bont.

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The experiments and the theoretical studies on which this work is based have been carried out at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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Bont, W.S. The basic property of biomembranes. Mol Biol Rep 36, 959–964 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-008-9268-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-008-9268-6

Keywords

  • Biomembranes
  • Discreteness of vesicle size