Attractive Interaction between Fully Charged Lipid Bilayers in a Strongly-Confined Geometry

Abstract

We investigate the interaction between highly charged lipid bilayers in the presence of monovalent counterions. Neutron and X-ray reflectivity experiments show that the water layer between like-charged bilayers is thinner than for zwitterionic lipids, demonstrating the existence of counterintuitive electrostatic attractive interaction between bilayers. Such attraction can be explained by taking into account the correlations between counterions within the Strong Coupling limit, which falls beyond the classical Poisson-Boltzmann theory of electrostatics. Our results show the limit of the Strong Coupling continuous theory in a highly confined geometry and are in agreement with a decrease in the water dielectric constant due to a surface charge-induced orientation of water molecules.

arXiv comment7 pages, 5 figures, Supplementary informations, submitted to Journal of Physical Chemistry

References in corpus (3)

• Anomalously low dielectric constant of confined water
• Electrostatic Interactions in Strongly-Coupled Soft Matter
• Controlling interactions in supported bilayers from weak electrostatic repulsion to high osmotic pressure

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Like-charge attraction at the nanoscale: ground-state correlations and water destructuring
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• Strong-coupling theory of counterions with hard cores between symmetrically charged walls
• Dielectric permittivity of water confined in stacks of charged lipid layers: extracting profiles from molecular dynamics simulations using a modified Poisson-Boltzmann equation
• The role of confined water in the emergence of electrostatic strong coupling as revealed by nanoseparated charged lipid layers