Free energies of stalk formation in the lipidomics era
Poojari, C. S.; Scherer, K. C.; Hub, J. S.
Show abstract
Many biological membranes are asymmetric and exhibit complex lipid composition, comprising hundreds of distinct chemical species. Identifying the biological function and advantage of this complexity is a central goal of membrane biology. Here, we study how membrane complexity controls the energetics of the first steps of membrane fusions, that is, the formation of a stalk. We first present a computationally efficient method for simulating thermodynamically reversible pathways of stalk formation at near-atomic resolution. The new method reveals that the inner leaflet of a typical plasma membrane is far more fusogenic than the outer leaflet, which is likely an adaptation to evolutionary pressure. To rationalize these findings by the distinct lipid compositions, we computed ~200 free energies of stalk formation in membranes with different lipid head groups, tail lengths, tail unsaturations, and sterol content. In summary, the simulations reveal a drastic influence of the lipid composition on stalk formation and a comprehensive fusogenicity map of many biologically relevant lipid classes.
Matching journals
The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- The molecular mechanism of lipid uptake by membrane-anchored bridge-like lipid transfer proteins. 96%
- Sensitive and Selective Polymer Condensation at Membrane Surface Driven by Positive Co-operativity 96%
- Biophysical modeling of membrane curvature generation and curvature sensing by the glycocalyx 95%
Similar papers in this journal
- Breakage of Hydrophobic Contacts Limits the Rate of Passive Lipid Exchange Between Membranes 98%
- Physical Characterization of Triolein and Implications for Its Role in Lipid Droplet Biogenesis 97%
- Intrinsically disordered membrane anchors of Rheb, RhoA and DiRas3 small GTPases: Molecular dynamics, membrane organization, and interactions 96%
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.