Cholesterol Sequestration by Xenon Leads to Lipid Raft Destabilization
Reyes-Figueroa, A. D.; Karttunen, M.; Ruiz-Suarez, J. C.
Show abstract
Combined coarse-grained (CG) and atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed to study the interactions of xenon with model lipid rafts consisting of 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DPPC), 1,2-dilauroyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DLPC) and cholesterol (Chol). At a concentration of 2 Xe/lipid we observed an unexpected result: Spontaneous nucleation of Xe nanoclusters which then rapidly plunged into the bilayer. In this process Chol, essential for raft stabilization, was pulled out from the raft into the hydrophobic zone. When concentration was further increased (3 Xe/lipid), the clusters disrupted both the membrane and raft. We computed the radial distribution functions, pair-wise potentials, second virial coefficients and Schlit-ter entropy to scrutinize the nature of the interactions. Our findings suggest that the well-known anaesthetic effect of Xe could be mediated by sequestration of Chol, which, in turn, compromises the stability of rafts where specialized proteins needed to produce the nervous signal are anchored.
Matching journals
The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Membrane binding of pore-forming γ-hemolysin components studied at different lipid compositions 96%
- Formation of aggregates, icosahedral structures and percolation clusters of fullerenes in lipids bilayers: The key role of lipid saturation 96%
- Intrinsic lipid curvatures of mammalian plasma membrane outer leaflet lipids and ceramides 96%
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.