Effects of disorder in location and size of fence barriers on molecular motion in cell membranes

TL;DR

This paper uses effective medium theory to analyze how disorder in fence barrier locations and heights affects molecular motion in cell membranes, providing a theoretical framework to interpret experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of effective medium theory to model disorder effects on molecular diffusion in cell membranes.

Findings

Confinement parameters can be extracted from experimental data.

Disorder significantly influences molecular transition rates.

The model helps interpret observed membrane molecule movements.

Abstract

The effect of disorder in the energetic heights and in the physical locations of fence barriers encountered by transmembrane molecules such as proteins and lipids in their motion in cell membranes is studied theoretically. The investigation takes as its starting point a recent analysis of a periodic system with constant distances between barriers and constant values of barrier heights, and employs effective medium theory to treat the disorder. The calculations make possible, in principle, the extraction of confinement parameters such as mean compartment sizes and mean intercompartmental transition rates from experimentally reported published observations. The analysis should be helpful both as an unusual application of effective medium theory and as an investigation of observed molecular movements in cell membranes.