Curvature sensing by cardiolipin in simulated buckled membranes

Cardiolipin is a non-bilayer phospholipid with a unique dimeric structure. It localizes to negative curvature regions in bacteria and is believed to stabilize respiratory chain complexes in the highly curved mitochondrial membrane. Cardiolipin's localization mechanism remains unresolved, because important aspects such as the structural basis and strength for lipid curvature preferences are difficult to determine, partly due to the lack of efficient simulation methods. Here, we report a computational approach to study curvature preferences of cardiolipin by simulated membrane buckling and quantitative modeling. We combine coarse-grained molecular dynamics with simulated buckling to determine the curvature preferences in three-component bilayer membranes with varying concentrations of cardiolipin, and extract curvature-dependent concentrations and lipid acyl chain order parameter profiles. Cardiolipin shows a strong preference for negative curvatures, with a highly asymmetric chain order parameter profile. The concentration profiles are consistent with an elastic model for lipid curvature sensing that relates lipid segregation to local curvature via the material constants of the bilayers. These computations constitute new steps to unravel the molecular mechanism by which cardiolipin senses curvature in lipid membranes, and the method can be generalized to other lipids and membrane components as well.