Membrane morphology induced by anisotropic proteins

Abstract

There are a great many proteins that localize to and collectively generate curvature in biological fluid membranes. We study changes in the topology of fluid membranes due to the presence of highly anisotropic, curvature-inducing proteins. Generically, we find a surprisingly rich phase diagram with phases of both positive and negative Gaussian curvature. As a concrete example modeled on experiments, we find that a lamellar phase in a negative Gaussian curvature regime exhibits a propensity to form screw dislocations of definite burgers scalar but of both chirality. The induced curvature depends strongly on the membrane rigidity, suggesting membrane composition can be a factor regulating membrane sculpting to to curvature-inducing proteins.

4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Elliptic Phases: A Study of the Nonlinear Elasticity of Twist-Grain Boundaries

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Long-range attraction of particles adhered to lipid vesicles
• Curvature-sensing and generation by membrane proteins: a review
• Curvature sensing of curvature-inducing proteins with internal structure
• Protein crowding on biomembranes: analysis of contour instabilities
• Structural symmetry and membrane curvature sensing
• Anisotropic membrane curvature sensing by amphipathic peptides