Tuesday, July 9, 2013

1307.1807 (Y. Hanlumyuang et al.)

How repulsive are biological membranes?    [PDF]

Y. Hanlumyuang, L. P. Liu, P. Sharma
The complex interplay between the various attractive and repulsive forces that mediate between biological membranes governs an astounding array of biological functions: cell adhesion, membrane fusion, self-assembly, binding-unbinding transition among others. In this work, the entropic repulsive force between membranes---which originates due to thermally excited fluctuations---is critically reexamined both analytically and through systematic Monte Carlo simulations. A recent work by Freund has questioned the validity of a well-accepted result derived by Helfrich. We find that, in agreement with Freund, for small inter-membrane separations (d), the entropic pressure scales as p 1/d, in contrast to Helfrich's result: p ~1/d^3$. For intermediate separations, our calculations agree with that of Helfrich and finally, for large inter-membrane separations, we observe an exponentially decaying behavior.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.1807

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