Transient Ordered Domains in Single-Component Phospholipid Bilayers

作     者：Teemu Murtola Tomasz Róg Emma Falck Mikko Karttunen Ilpo Vattulainen 

作者机构：Laboratory of Physics and Helsinki Institute of Physics Helsinki University of Technology FI-02015 Espoo Finland Biophysics and Statistical Mechanics Group Laboratory of Computational Engineering Helsinki University of Technology FI-02015 Finland Department of Biophysics Faculty of Biotechnology Jagellonian University PL-30387 Krakow Poland Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Illinois 61801 USA Department of Applied Mathematics The University of Western Ontario London ON Canada N6A 5B7 Institute of Physics Tampere University of Technology FI-33101 Tampere Finland Memphys-Center for Biomembrane Physics Physics Department University of Southern Denmark DK-5230 Odense M Denmark 

出 版 物：《Physical Review Letters》 (Phys Rev Lett)

年 卷 期：2006年第97卷第23期

页      面：238102-238102页

核心收录：

学科分类：07[理学] 0702[理学-物理学] 

主　　题：Phospholipids 

摘      要：We report evidence of dense, ordered nanodomains in single-component fluid lipid bilayers. Our atomic-scale molecular dynamics simulations suggest that the area available to a lipid acyl chain exhibits large fluctuations, resulting in denser and sparser domains. The sizes of the dense domains can be up to ∼10 nm, and their lifetimes are of the order of ∼10 ns. In addition, our simulations suggest that domains of lipids with highly ordered acyl chains form predominantly within the dense regions, their sizes ranging from a few chains up to a few nanometers, and with lifetimes between ∼10 ps–10 ns. These observations shed light on the origin of experimentally observed fluctuations, as well as on the mechanisms of phase transitions in lipid membranes.