Liquid-crystal self-assembly of lipid membranes on solutions: A dissipative particle dynamic simulation study

Publication date: 21 April 2017
Source:Polymer, Volume 115
Author(s): Xiaowei Qiang, Xianghong Wang, Yongyun Ji, Shiben Li, Linli He
The self-assembly of the amphiphilic lipid molecules in aqueous solution is investigated via dissipative particle dynamic simulation. Lipid bilayer and perforated bilayer membranes, together with the micelles and vesicles, which couple the spatial inhomogeneity and orientation ordering, are observed in equilibrium states and dynamics processes. For the equilibrium states, the phase diagrams are arranged by the lengths of head and tail chains in various lipid-water mixtures, where the influence of chain length and water composition on formation of bilayer and perforated bilayer membranes is carefully analyzed. In the dynamic processes, we investigate the bilayer membranes by analyzing the energies of systems, which indicates that the formations of bilayers and perforated bilayers strongly depended on the initial chain distributions and lipid types. Moreover, we also investigate the dependence of elastic modulus on the chain lengths for the bilayer membranes and the tension for the perforated pores in the perforated bilayer membranes. The observations on these liquid-crystalline self-assembly provided a promising approach that could be used to design and understand the biomembrane based on the lipid molecules.

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