Determination of Elastic Parameters of Lipid Membranes with Molecular Dynamics: A Review of Approaches and Theoretical Aspects

TL;DR

This review discusses molecular dynamics methods for determining the elastic parameters of lipid membranes, highlighting theoretical challenges and recent developments in simulating membrane deformations at the molecular level.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of MD approaches for lipid membrane elasticity, emphasizing theoretical aspects and addressing key challenges in the field.

Findings

Identifies ambiguity in transitioning from continuum theories to MD simulations.

Highlights complexity in determining elastic parameters of lipid mixtures.

Discusses recent advances in in silico membrane modeling.

Abstract

Lipid membranes are abundant in living organisms, where they constitute a surrounding shell for cells and their organelles. There are many circumstances in which the deformations of lipid membranes are involved in living cells: fusion and fission, membrane-mediated interaction between membrane inclusions, lipid-protein interaction, formation of pores, etc. In all of these cases, elastic parameters of lipid membranes are important for the description of membrane deformations, as these parameters determine energy barriers and characteristic times of membrane-involved phenomena. Since the development of molecular dynamics (MD), a variety of in silico methods have been proposed for the determination of elastic parameters of simulated lipid membranes. These MD methods allow for the consideration of details unattainable in experimental techniques and represent a distinct scientific field, which is rapidly developing. This work provides a review of these MD approaches with a focus on theoretical aspects. Two main challenges are identified: (i) the ambiguity in the transition from the continuum description of elastic theories to the discrete representation of MD simulations, and (ii) the determination of intrinsic elastic parameters of lipid mixtures, which is complicated due to the composition-curvature coupling effect.