Journal
BIOPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 97, Issue 4, Pages 1087-1094Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.bpj.2009.05.051
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Funding
- U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation
- U.S.-Israel Educational Foundation
- Israel Science Foundation
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [0803103] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Materials Research [0803103] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Cell membranes contain small domains (on the order of nanometers in size, sometimes called rafts) of lipids whose hydrocarbon chains are more ordered than those of the surrounding bulk-phase lipids. Whether these domains are fluctuations, metastable, or thermodynamically stable, is still unclear. Here, we show theoretically how a lipid with one saturated hydrocarbon chain that prefers the ordered environment and one partially unsaturated chain that prefers the less ordered phase, can act as a line-active component. We present a unified model that treats the lipids in both the bulk and at the interface and show how they lower the line tension between domains, eventually driving it to zero at sufficiently large interaction strengths or at sufficiently low temperatures. In this limit, finite-sized domains stabilized by the packing of these hybrid lipids can form as equilibrium structures.
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