Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Aggregation of Flexible Peripheral Membrane Proteins

Biomembrane remodeling is essential for cellular trafficking, with membrane-binding peripheral proteins playing a key role in it. Significant membrane remodeling as in endo- and exocytosis is often due to aggregates of many proteins with direct or membrane-mediated interactions. Understanding this process via computer simulations is extremely challenging: protein-membrane systems involve time and length scales that make atomistic simulations impractical, while most coarse-grained models fall short in resolving dynamics and physical effects of protein and membrane flexibility. Here, we develop a coarse-grained model of the bilayer membrane bestrewed with rotationally symmetric flexible proteins, parametrized to reflect local curvatures and lateral dynamics of proteins. We investigate the kinetics, equilibrium distributions, and the free energy landscape governing the formation and breakup of protein clusters on the surface of the membrane. We demonstrate how the flexibility of the proteins as well as their surface concentration play deciding roles in highly selective macroscopic aggregation behavior.