Nanodomains in biomembranes with recycling

TL;DR

This paper presents an analytically solvable model showing that membrane recycling causes a logarithmic increase in protein nanodomain size, with potential for experimental verification using super-resolution microscopy.

Contribution

It introduces a new model incorporating recycling effects into biomembrane nanodomain size prediction, highlighting a logarithmic growth with recycling rate.

Findings

Cluster size increases logarithmically with recycling rate.

Recycling can cause a two-fold increase in nanodomain size.

Predicted effects are experimentally measurable with super-resolution microscopy.

Abstract

Cell membranes are out of thermodynamic equilibrium notably because of membrane recycling, i.e. active exchange of material with the cytosol. We propose an analytically tractable model of biomembrane predicting the effects of recycling on the size of protein nanodomains. It includes a short-range attraction between proteins and a weaker long-range repulsion which ensures the existence of so-called cluster phases at equilibrium, where monomeric proteins coexist with finite-size domains. Our main finding is that when taking recycling into account, the typical cluster size increases logarithmically with the recycling rate. Using physically realistic model parameters, the predicted two-fold increase due to recycling in living cells is very likely experimentally measurable with the help of super-resolution microscopy.