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Updated: Mar 25, 2026

A Nanobar-Supported Lipid Bilayer System for the Study of Membrane Curvature Sensing Proteins in vitro
Published on: November 30, 2022
Sugar does not affect the bending and tilt moduli of simple lipid bilayers
John F Nagle1, Michael S Jablin1, Stephanie Tristram-Nagle1
1Department of Physics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA.
Abstract:
The diffuse X-ray scattering method has been applied to samples composed of SOPC, DOPC, DMPC, and POPC with added sugar, either sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose, or trehalose. Several sugar concentrations in the range 200-500 mM were investigated for each of the lipid/sugar samples. We observed no systematic change in the bending modulus KC or in the tilt modulus Kθ with increasing sugar concentration. The average values of both these moduli were the same as those of the respective pure lipid controls within statistical uncertainty of 2%. These results are inconsistent with previous reports of sugar concentration dependent values of KC.
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