Membrane-mediated interactions between arc-shaped particles strongly depend on membrane curvature

TL;DR

This study systematically investigates how membrane curvature influences the membrane-mediated interactions between arc-shaped particles using coarse-grained simulations, revealing that interactions weaken with increasing curvature.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of membrane-mediated interactions across various membrane curvatures, highlighting the dependence on shape and curvature for the first time.

Findings

Interactions exceed thermal energy at low curvature, promoting aggregation.

Interactions decrease with increasing membrane curvature.

Minimal interactions observed for tubular shapes with high curvature.

Abstract

Besides direct molecular interactions, proteins and nanoparticles embedded in or adsorbed to membranes experience indirect interactions that are mediated by the membranes. These membrane-mediated interactions arise from the membrane curvature induced by the particles and can lead to assemblies of particles that generate highly curved spherical or tubular membranes shapes, but have mainly been quantified for planar or weakly curved membranes. In this article, we systematically investigate the membrane-mediated interactions of arc-shaped particles adsorbed to a variety of tubular and spherical membrane shapes with coarse-grained modelling and simulations. We determine both the pairwise interaction free energy, with includes entropic contributions due to rotational entropy loss at close particle distances, and the pairwise interaction energy without entropic components from particle distributions observed in the simulations. For membrane shapes with small curvature, the membrane-mediated interaction free energies of particle pairs exceed the thermal energy kT and can lead to particle ordering and aggregation. The interactions strongly decrease with increasing curvature of the membrane shape and are minimal for tubular shapes with membrane curvatures close to the particle curvature.