Phospholipid chain length alters the equilibrium between pore and channel forms of gramicidin

Gramicidin is an excellent model system for studying the passage of ions through biological membranes. The conformation of gramicidin is well defined in many different solvent and lipid systems, as are its conductance and spectroscopic properties. It is a polymorphic molecule that can adopt two different types of structure, the double helical "pore" and the helical dimer "channel". This study investigated the influence of the acyl chain length of membrane phospholipids on the conformations adopted by gramicidin. We used circular dichroism spectroscopy to examine the conformational equilibrium between the pore and channel forms in small unilamellar vesicles of phosphatidylcholine with acyl chain lengths of 18, 20 and 22 carbons. Our results show that in C18 and C20 lipids almost all the gramicidin is in the channel form, while in the longer C22 lipids the equilibrium shifts in favour of pore conformations, such that they form up to 43% of the total population. This change is attributed to the ability of the double helical conformation to tolerate more hydrophobic mismatch than the helical dimer, perhaps due to the greater number of stabilising intermolecular hydrogen bonds.