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  4. Lipid Builder: A Framework To Build Realistic Models for Biological Membranes
 
research article

Lipid Builder: A Framework To Build Realistic Models for Biological Membranes

Bovigny, Christophe  
•
Tamo, Giorgio  
•
Lemmin, Thomas  
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2015
Journal Of Chemical Information And Modeling

The physical and chemical characterization of biological membranes is of fundamental importance for understanding the functional role of lipid bilayers in shaping cells and organelles, steering vesicle trafficking and promoting membrane-protein signaling. Molecular dynamics simulations stand as a powerful tool to probe the properties of membranes at atomistic level. However, the biological membrane is highly complex, and closely mimicking its physiological constitution in silico is not a straightforward task. Here, we present Lipid Builder, a framework for creating and storing models of biologically relevant phospholipid species with acyl tails of heterogeneous composition. LipidBuilder also enables the assembly of these database-stored lipids into realistic bilayers featuring asymmetric distribution on layer leaflets and concentration of given membrane constituents as defined, for example, by lipidomics experiments. The ability of LipidBuilder to assemble robust membrane models was validated by simulating membranes of homogeneous lipid composition for which experimental data are available. Furthermore, taking advantage of the extensive lipid headgroup repertoire, we assembled models of membranes of heterogeneous nature as naturally found in viral (phage PRD1), bacterial (Salmonella enterica, Laurinavicius, S.; Kakela, R.; Somerharju, P.; Bamford, D. H.; Virology 2004, 322, 328-336) and plant (Chlorella kessleri, Rezanka, T.; Podojil, M.; J. Chromatogr. 1989, 463, 397-408) organisms. These realistic membrane models were built using a near-exact lipid composition revealed from analytical chemistry experiments. We suggest LipidBuilder as a useful tool to model biological membranes of near-biological complexity, and as a robust complement to the current efforts to characterize the biophysical properties of biological membrane using molecular simulation.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1021/acs.jcim.5b00501
Web of Science ID

WOS:000367560200002

Author(s)
Bovigny, Christophe  
Tamo, Giorgio  
Lemmin, Thomas  
Maino, Nicolas
Dal Peraro, Matteo  
Date Issued

2015

Publisher

Amer Chemical Soc

Published in
Journal Of Chemical Information And Modeling
Volume

55

Issue

12

Start page

2491

End page

2499

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
UPDALPE  
Available on Infoscience
February 16, 2016
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/123949
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