Colloquia

Coarse-grained Simulation Studies of Mesoscopic Membrane Phenomena

Lipid membranes exhibit a large spectrum of fascinating physical behavior, spanning many orders of magnitude both in length- and time scales. To cover this wide range, models of different resolution have been developed. In the intermediate regime of about 100 nanometer length scale and micro- to millisecond time scale mesoscopic coarse-grained models have recently covered much ground. I will describe a particular solvent-free coarse-grained model developed by us and illustrate its applicability to a wide variety of phenomena, among them pore-formation by amphipathic peptides, protein aggregation on critically mixed bilayers, and membrane vesiculation driven by curvature-imprinting proteins.