Regensburg 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 19: Membranes and Vesicles II

BP 19.2: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 19. März 2025, 09:45–10:00, H46

The effect of long-chain sphingolipids on lipid bilayers — •Clara Rickhoff, Annemarie Quas, and Andreas Heuer — Institut für Physikalische Chemie, Universität Münster, Münster, Germany

Lipid bilayers are found to form microdomains, so called rafts, that support a sorting of compounds in the bilayer, and that way are thought to be essential for cellular processes, such as vesicular traffic. One type of raft that is found in lipid bilayers of e.g. yeast cells in experiments are sphingolipid-enriched and sterol-depleted domains, that seem to form gel-like domains. In our work, we conduct MD simulations of lipid bilayers containing different concentrations of long-chain sphingolipids in order to investigate their effect on the membrane at the atomistic level. The remaining part of the lipid bilayer is chosen close to experimental results (Wedlich-Söldner group, University of Münster). From these simulations we gain insight into structural properties such as of e.g. the order parameter, the RDF or the interdigitation. This allows a deeper understanding of the order of the long-chain spingolipids, their effect on the overall membrane structure and the coupling between the leaflets.

Keywords: lipid bilayers; MD simulations; sphingolipids; yeast; biological membranes