Berlin 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 82: Membranes and Vesicles II (joint session BP/CPP)

CPP 82.9: Vortrag

Freitag, 16. März 2018, 11:45–12:00, H 2013

Cholesterol effects on lateral structure formation — •Fabian Keller, Davit Hakobyan, and Andreas Heuer — Institut für Physikalische Chemie, Münster, Deutschland

Cholesterol is essential for, e.g. , the domain formation of lipid membrane mixtures and is thus at the heart of many basic properties of lipid membranes.

In recent studies we could show that cholesterol is able to intercalate between DPPC molecules without changing the mean distance of their head groups and, surprisingly, not changing the number of DPPC or DLiPC neighbors. Additionally the presence of cholesterol was found to decrease the lipid-lipid interactions of nearby lipids, indicating the complex interaction mechanisms in cholesterol containing bilayers. Our findings support the observations of cholesterol's condensing capabilities and DPPC-cholesterol interaction to be the driving force for domain formation.

To further understand the underlying mechanisms of cholesterols unique properties it is an essential step to include cholesterol to a formerly introduced Monte Carlo lattice model mapping MD data of DPPC and DUPC bilayers to a lattice [1]. Using this model one will be able to study cholesterol structure formation for decisively greater length and time scales, thereby completely resorting to input from short-time MD data.

[1] D. Hakobyan, A. Heuer, J. Chem. Phys. 146, 064305 (2017)