Topological Bounds of Bending Energy for Lipid Vesicles

TL;DR

This paper investigates the topological bounds and minimizers of generalized bending energies for lipid vesicles, revealing how anisotropy influences vesicle shape transitions and extending the Helfrich shape equation.

Contribution

It introduces a scale-invariant anisotropic curvature energy model, establishes topological bounds, and derives a generalized shape equation extending Helfrich's model.

Findings

Unique energy minimizer for embedded ring tori across parameters

Elevated anisotropy induces shape transitions from spherical to biconcave

Topological bounds depend on genus and energy parameters

Abstract

The Helfrich bending energy plays an important role in providing a mechanism for the conformation of a lipid vesicle in theoretical biophysics, which is governed by the principle of energy minimization over configurations of appropriate topological characteristics. We will show that the presence of a quantity called the spontaneous curvature obstructs the existence of a minimizer of the Helfrich energy over the set of embedded ring tori. Besides, despite the well-realized knowledge that lipid vesicles may present themselves in a variety of shapes of complicated topology, there is a lack of topological bounds for the Helfrich energy. To overcome these difficulties, we consider a general scale-invariant anisotropic curvature energy that extends the Canham elastic bending energy developed in modeling a biconcave-shaped red blood cell. We will show that, up to a rescaling of the generating radii, there is a unique minimizer of the energy over the set of embedded ring tori, in the entire parameter regime, which recovers the Willmore minimizer in its Canham isotropic limit. We also show how elevated anisotropy favors energetically a clear transition from spherical-, to ellipsoidal-, and then to biconcave-shaped surfaces, for a lipid vesicle. We then establish some genus-dependent topological lower and upper bounds for the anisotropic energy. Finally, we derive the shape equation of the generalized bending energy, which extends the well-known Helfrich shape equation.