Biological and synthetic membranes: What can be learned from a coarse-grained description?

TL;DR

This paper reviews how coarse-grained models help understand membrane structure and thermodynamics, highlighting recent advances, model development, and applications like membrane fusion simulations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of coarse-grained modeling approaches and their application to membrane topology changes, especially fusion, in a rapidly evolving field.

Findings

Coarse-grained models offer insights into large-scale membrane phenomena.

Recent progress includes advanced model development and computational techniques.

Applications demonstrate effectiveness in studying membrane fusion processes.

Abstract

We discuss the role coarse-grained models play in the investigation of the structure and thermodynamics of bilayer membranes, and we place them in the context of alternative approaches. Because they reduce the degrees of freedom and employ simple and soft effective potentials, coarse-grained models can provide rather direct insight into collective phenomena in membranes on large time and length scales. We present a summary of recent progress in this rapidly evolving field, and pay special attention to model development and computational techniques. Applications of coarse-grained models to changes of the membrane topology are illustrated with studies of membrane fusion utilizing simulations and self-consistent field theory.