Comment on electrostatics of membranes

Electrostatics of Cell Membranes

The electrostatic potential due to a charge in or near the plasma membrane of a eukaryotic cell is computed and applied to the transduction of cell-penetrating peptides and to the exocytosis of neurotransmitters.

Electrostatics of deformable lipid membranes.

It was recently demonstrated that significant local deformations of biological membranes take place due to the fields of charged peptides and ions, challenging the standard model of membrane electrostatics. The ability of ions to retain their immediate hydration environment, combined with the lack of sensitivity of permeability to ion type or even ion pairs, led us to question the extent to whi...

Comment on the validation of continuum electrostatics models

A validation based on solvation energies (vacuum to water transfer) is not sufficient to justify the use of approximated models of electrostatics to rank ligand/protein complexes. A full validation should be based on energies in solution, i.e., solvation plus vacuum Coulomb energies, because of the anticorrelation between solvation and vacuum energies. The energy in solution is the relevant qua...

Reply to “Comment on ‘Thermodynamics of quantum crystalline membranes’ ”

Extension of CAVS coarse-grained model to phospholipid membranes: The importance of electrostatics

It is evident from experiment that electrostatic potential (or dipole potential) is positive inside PC or PE lipid bilayers in the absence of ions. MARTINI coarse-grained (CG) model, which has been widely used in simulating physical properties of lipid bilayers, fails to reproduce the positive value for the dipole potential in the membrane interior. Although the total dipole potential can be co...