Stabilizing Leaflet Asymmetry under Differential Stress in a Highly Coarse-Grained Lipid Membrane Model

We present a version of the coarse-grained Cooke lipid model, modified to simulate asymmetric lipid membranes. It is inspired by a method employed by Wang et al. [ Commun. Comput. Phys. 2013, 13, 1093-1106] for artificially penalizing lipid flip-flop but copes more robustly with differential stress, at the cost of one additional bead per lipid and the concomitant increase in computational overhead. Bilayer asymmetry ultimately breaks down beyond a system size dependent critical differential stress, which can be predicted from a simple analytical model. We remeasure many important material parameters for the new model and find it to be consistent with typical fluid lipid membranes. Maintaining a stable stress asymmetry has many applications, and we give two examples: (i) connecting monolayer stress to lipid number asymmetry in order to directly measure the monolayer area modulus and (ii) finding its strain-dependent higher-order correction by monitoring the equilibrium bilayer area.