Bilayer Membrane in Confined Geometry: Interlayer Slide and Steric Repulsion

TL;DR

This paper develops a first-principles elastic model of bilayer membranes that includes interlayer slide and confinement effects, revealing how these factors influence membrane stability, steric interactions, and viscous modes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel free energy functional accounting for interlayer slide, bending, and confinement, and analyzes their impact on membrane behavior and viscous modes.

Findings

Temperature-dependent curvature is enhanced fourfold with slide.

Confinement modifies the membrane's bending mode.

Inter-layer slipping mode remains unaffected by confinement.

Abstract

We derived free energy functional of a bilayer lipid membrane from the first principles of elasticity theory. The model explicitly includes position-dependent mutual slide of monolayers and bending deformation. Our free energy functional of liquid-crystalline membrane allows for incompressibility of the membrane and vanishing of the in-plane shear modulus and obeys reflectional and rotational symmetries of the flat bilayer. Interlayer slide at the mid-plane of the membrane results in local difference of surface densities of the monolayers. The slide amplitude directly enters free energy via the strain tensor. For small bending deformations the ratio between bending modulus and area compression coefficient, Kb/KA, is proportional to the square of monolayer thickness, h. Using the functional we performed self-consistent calculation of steric potential acting on bilayer between parallel confining walls separated by distance 2d. We found that temperature-dependent curvature at the minimum of confining potential is enhanced four times for a bilayer with slide as compared with a unit bilayer. We also calculate viscous modes of bilayer membrane between confining walls. Pure bending of the membrane is investigated, which is decoupled from area dilation at small amplitudes. Three sources of viscous dissipation are considered: water and membrane viscosities and interlayer drag. Dispersion has two branches. Confinement between the walls modifies the bending mode with respect to membrane in bulk solution. Simultaneously, inter-layer slipping mode, damped by viscous drag, remains unchanged by confinement.