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Extracting Curvature Preferences of Lipids Assembled in Flat Bilayers Shows Possible Kinetic Windows for Genesis of Bilayer Asymmetry and Domain Formation in Biological Membranes

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Abstract

Studies on the assembly of pure lipid components allow mechanistic insights toward understanding the structural and functional aspects of biological membranes. Molecular dynamic (MD) simulations on membrane systems provide molecular details on membrane dynamics that are difficult to obtain experimentally. A large number of MD studies have remained somewhat disconnected from a key concept of amphipathic assembly resulting in membrane structures—shape parameters of lipid molecules in those structures in aqueous environments. This is because most of the MD studies have been done on flat lipid membranes. With the above in view, we analyzed MD simulations of 26 pure lipid patches as a function of (1) lipid type(s) and (2) time of MD simulations along with 35–40 ns trajectories of five pure lipids. We report, for the first time, extraction of curvature preferences of lipids from MD simulations done on flat bilayers. Our results may lead to mechanistic insights into the possible origins of bilayer asymmetries and domain formation in biological membranes.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Suhas Vasaikar and Chanchal Acharya at the Indian Institute of Technology for helpful discussions. S. B. is grateful for research fellowship support from the Council of Scientific and Industrial research, government of India. We are also very grateful to our anonymous reviewers for their invaluable inputs in improving the quality of our manuscript.

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  1. Kusuma School of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Suneyna Bansal & Aditya Mittal

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  1. Suneyna Bansal
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  2. Aditya Mittal
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Correspondence to Aditya Mittal.

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Bansal, S., Mittal, A. Extracting Curvature Preferences of Lipids Assembled in Flat Bilayers Shows Possible Kinetic Windows for Genesis of Bilayer Asymmetry and Domain Formation in Biological Membranes. J Membrane Biol 246, 557–570 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00232-013-9568-1

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