Continuum Electromechanical Modeling of Protein-Membrane Interaction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a continuum electromechanical model that predicts membrane curvature changes caused by electrostatic interactions in protein-membrane systems, integrating mechanical and electrostatic energies.

Contribution

It presents a novel coupled model that combines membrane mechanics and electrostatics to accurately simulate membrane deformation due to electrostatic forces.

Findings

Model captures membrane curvature sensitivity to charge distributions.

Successfully applied to systems with increasing geometric complexity.

Provides a framework for understanding electrostatic effects on membranes.

Abstract

A continuum electromechanical model is proposed to describe the membrane curvature induced by electrostatic interactions in a solvated protein-membrane system. The model couples the macroscopic strain energy of membrane and the electrostatic solvation energy of the system, and equilibrium membrane deformation is obtained by minimizing the electro-elastic energy functional with respect to the dielectric interface. The model is illustrated with the systems with increasing geometry complexity and captures the sensitivity of membrane curvature to the permanent and mobile charge distributions.