Theoretical and simulation study of lipid membranes

It has been established that a proper functioning of biological lipid membranes is in large part due to cholesterol's ability to regulate fluidity of a lipid bilayer. In particular, a growing body of evidence suggested that cholesterol participates in the formation of cholesterol- and sphingolipid-enriched phase-separated domains known as "rafts" in the plasma and other membranes of animal cells. Rafts have been identified as important membrane structural components in signal transduction, protein transport and sorting of membrane components. At a molecular level, the detailed, localized behavior of lipid-cholesterol bilayers is unclear. In order to better understand how cholesterols function in lipid membranes it is desirable to built theoretical models. The goal of the present research is to model lipid-cholesterol bilayers on the different length and timescales. In the first part of the work, mixtures of sphingomyelin (SM) lipid and cholesterol at different temperatures and cholesterol concentrations were investigated using Molecular Dynamics and Monte-Carlo simulation techniques. The objective was to study the properties of cholesterol- and SM-enriched raft-like domains at the atomic level. The simulations revealed that, addition of 31% cholesterol induced intermediate degree of organization in the model SM-cholesterol bilayers at temperatures below and above the main phase transition temperature of pure SM bilayer. This intermediate state of fluidity may be necessary for the binding of proteins and other molecules that associate with raft domains. In the second part of the work, dynamical self-consistent mean-field model based on atomistic simulations was developed to investigate phase properties of lipid-cholesterol bilayers on the length and timescales currently unreachable with traditional atomistic level simulation methods. This new technique allows studying systems consisting of 104 or more number of molecules, on microsecond timescales. The model was applied to dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine lipid-cholesterol bilayers at 50°C temperature and for the range of cholesterol concentrations. Over the 20 mus simulation timescale the model predicted the continuous change in lipid chain order with increasing cholesterol content. No large-scale cholesterol-rich and cholesterol-depleted coexisting phase separated regions were observed at any cholesterol concentration.