CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online.

Nanoscopic description of biomembrane electrostatics: Results of molecular dynamics simulations and fluorescence probing Export

Chemistry and Physics of Lipids (27 May 2009)

Citation Format

[Posts]

View FullText article


baker-group's tags for this article

biomembranes electrostatics

X Reviews [Write a review of this article]

X Find related articles from these CiteULike users

X Find related articles with these CiteULike tags

X Posting History

X Abstract

Electrostatic fields generated on and inside biological membranes are recognized to play a fundamental role in key processes of cell functioning. Their understanding requires an adequate description on the level of elementary charges and the reconstruction of electrostatic potentials by integration over all elementary interactions. Out of all the available research tools, only molecular dynamics simulations are capable of this, extending from the atomic to the mesoscopic level of description on the required time and space scale. A complementary approach is that offered by molecular probe methods, with the application of electrochromic dyes. Highly sensitive to intermolecular interactions, they already generate integrated signals arising from electric fields produced by elementary charges at the sites of their location. This review is an attempt to provide a critical analysis of these two approaches and their present and potential applications. The results obtained by both methods are consistent in that they both show an extremely complex profile of the electric field in the membrane. The nanoscopic view, with two-dimensional averaging over the bilayer plane and formal separation of the electrostatic potential into surface (Ψ s ), dipole (Ψ d ) and transmembrane (Ψ t ) potentials, is constructive in the analysis of different functional properties of membranes.


X BibTeX record

X RIS record


Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions
CiteULike organises scholarly (or academic) papers or literature and provides bibliographic (which means it makes bibliographies) for universities and higher education establishments. It helps undergraduates and postgraduates. People studying for PhDs or in postdoctoral (postdoc) positions. The service is similar in scope to EndNote or RefWorks or any other reference manager like BibTeX, but it is a social bookmarking service for scientists and humanities researchers.