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Scientists identified the plasma membrane in the 1890s and its principal chemical components (lipids and proteins) by 1915. The model for plasma membrane structure, proposed in 1935 by Hugh Davson and James Danielli, was the first model to be widely accepted in the scientific community. The model was based on the plasma membrane's "railroad track" appearance in early electron micrographs. Davson and Danielli theorized that the plasma membrane's structure resembled a sandwich...
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Fluorescence Recovery after Merging a Droplet to Measure the Two-dimensional Diffusion of a Phospholipid Monolayer
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Interleaflet mixing and coupling in liquid-disordered phospholipid bilayers.

Sara Capponi1, J Alfredo Freites2, Douglas J Tobias2

  • 1Department of Physiology and Biophysics and Center for Biomembrane Systems, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.

Biochimica Et Biophysica Acta
|December 15, 2015
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Phospholipid bilayers exhibit significant mixing between leaflets, challenging traditional views of interleaflet coupling. This study reveals a complex "distributed complementarity" in fluid membranes, not simple chain-length matching.

Keywords:
Bilayer structureMethyl distributionMolecular dynamics simulationRafts

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Area of Science:

  • Membrane Biophysics
  • Computational Biology
  • Molecular Dynamics

Background:

  • Phospholipids form cellular membranes as bilayers, crucial for biological functions.
  • Interactions between bilayer leaflets (interleaflet coupling) are vital for membrane signaling but lack a clear structural definition.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate interleaflet mixing in fluid phospholipid bilayers using molecular dynamics simulations.
  • To provide a structural basis for understanding interleaflet coupling and its role in membrane information passage.

Main Methods:

  • All-atom molecular dynamics simulations of five distinct phospholipid bilayers (DOPC, POPC, SOPC, OMPC, DMPC).
  • Calculation of transbilayer distributions of acyl chain terminal methyl groups to quantify interleaflet mixing.
  • Analysis of methylene order parameters to assess acyl-chain ordering.

Main Results:

  • Observed strong interleaflet mixing across the bilayer midplane for all simulated lipids.
  • Mixing decreased with increased acyl-chain ordering.
  • Introduced "distributed complementarity" to describe complex lipid associations, differing from simple complementarity models.

Conclusions:

  • Fluid phospholipid bilayers display substantial transbilayer lipid mixing.
  • The concept of interleaflet coupling is more complex than previously thought, characterized by distributed complementarity in disordered membranes.