Skip over navigation

 

Anisotropic spontaneous curvature in lipid membranes

Ashutosh Agrawal (University of Houston), Nikhil Walani (University of Houston)

SES Medal Symposium in honor of D.J. Steigmann

Tue 4:20 - 5:40

MacMillan 115

Nonlinear fluid shell theory has been extensively used to model and understand the physics of lipid membranes. Symmetry restrictions due to fluidity require the strain energy to depend on the mean and Gaussian curvatures and result in local isotropic conditions. This notion carries over to the spontaneous curvatures generated by proteins and lipids that regulate membrane morphology. However, there are special proteins in cells that induce different curvatures along and perpendicular to the direction of their orientation. In this work, we will discuss a generalized theory of biomembranes that allows modeling of such anisotropic curvatures and present a few related case studies.