Prof. P.B. Sunil Kumar: Domain growth in fluid membranes with asymmetric transbilayer lipid distribution

Ob 13h vse udeležence vabimo na čaj. Prof. P.B. Sunil Kumar, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036, India Domain growth in fluid membranes with asymmetric transbilayer lipid distribution In contrast to the mosaic model for biological membranes, which assumes that biomembranes are homogeneous structures, many recent experiments have demonstrated that biomembranes of eukaryotic cells exhibit both compositional and conformational organization. This has motivated a number of investigations of phase ordering in simple two component membrane systems. These studies have shown that the dynamics of domain growth in membranes is affected by the interplay between composition, line tension between domains and the lateral tension on the membrane. Another interesting aspect about the cell membranes is the asymmetric distribution of lipids in the two leaflets. What role does the compositional asymmetry between the two leaflets play on the domain structure of lipid bilayers? In particular, will this asymmetry result in a finite size of these domains? We use large scale dissipative particle dynamics simulations of two component membranes to answer these questions.