Membrane phase transition during heating and cooling: molecular insight into reversible melting.

Sun L, Böckmann R (2017)


Publication Language: English

Publication Status: Published

Publication Type: Journal article, Original article

Publication year: 2017

Journal

DOI: 10.1007/s00249-017-1237-3

Abstract

With increasing temperature, lipid bilayers undergo a gel-fluid phase transition, which plays an essential role in many physiological phenomena. In the present work, this first-order phase transition was investigated for variable heating and cooling rates for a dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) lipid bilayer by means of atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. Alternative methods to track the melting temperature [Formula: see text] are compared. The resulting [Formula: see text] is shown to be independent of the scan rate for small heating rates (0.05-0.3 K/ns) implying reversible melting, and increases for larger heating (0.3-4 K/ns) or cooling rates (2-0.1 K/ns). The reported dependency of the melting temperature on the heating rate is in perfect agreement with a two-state kinetic rate model as suggested previously. Expansion and shrinkage, as well as the dynamics of melting seeds is described. The simulations further exhibit a relative shift between melting seeds in opposing membrane leaflets as predicted from continuum elastic theory.

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APA:

Sun, L., & Böckmann, R. (2017). Membrane phase transition during heating and cooling: molecular insight into reversible melting. European Biophysics Journal. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00249-017-1237-3

MLA:

Sun, Liping, and Rainer Böckmann. "Membrane phase transition during heating and cooling: molecular insight into reversible melting." European Biophysics Journal (2017).

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