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Updated: Jul 7, 2026

High-Speed Magnetic Tweezers for Nanomechanical Measurements on Force-Sensitive Elements
Published on: May 12, 2023
Transmembrane helix tilting: insights from calculating the potential of mean force
1Department of Molecular Biosciences and Center for Bioinformatics, The University of Kansas, 2030 Becker Drive, Lawrence, KS 66047, USA.
Abstract:
To explore the microscopic forces governing the helix tilting in membranes, we have calculated the potential of mean force (PMF) as a function of tilt angle (tau) of WALP19, a transmembrane model peptide, in a dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine membrane. The PMF shows a wide range of thermally accessible tilt angles (5 degrees to 22 degrees ) with a minimum at tau=12.5 degrees . The free energy decomposition reveals that the helix tilting up to tau=12.5 degrees is mostly driven by the entropy contribution arising from the helix precession around the membrane normal, whereas the PMF increase after tau=12.5 degrees results from helical deformation due to the sequence-specific helix-lipid interactions.
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