Protein Crowding in Lipid Bilayers Gives Rise to Non-Gaussian Anomalous Lateral Diffusion of Phospholipids and Proteins

By Jae-Hyung Jeon, Matti Javanainen, H. Martinez-Seara, Ralf Metzler, I. Vattulainen. 2016

216 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Biomembranes are exceptionally crowded with proteins with typical protein-to-lipid ratios being around 1 ∶ 50 − 1 ∶ 100 . Protein crowding has a decisive role in lateral membrane dynamics as shown by recent experimental and computational studies that have reported anomalous lateral diffusion of phospholipids and membrane proteins in crowded lipid membranes. Based on extensive simulations and stochastic modeling of the simulated trajectories, we here investigate in detail how increasing crowding by membrane proteins reshapes the stochastic characteristics of the anomalous lateral diffusion in lipid membranes. We observe that correlated Gaussian processes of the fractional Langevin equation type, identified as the stochastic mechanism behind lipid motion in noncrowded bilayer, no longer adequately describe the lipid and protein motion in crowded but otherwise identical membranes. It turns out that protein crowding gives rise to a multifractal, non-Gaussian, and spatiotemporally heterogeneous anomalous lateral diffusion on time scales from nanoseconds to, at least, tens of microseconds. Our investigation strongly suggests that the macromolecular complexity and spatiotemporal membrane heterogeneity in cellular membranes play critical roles in determining the stochastic nature of the lateral diffusion and, consequently, the associated dynamic phenomena within membranes. Clarifying the exact stochastic mechanism for various kinds of biological membranes is an important step towards a quantitative understanding of numerous intramembrane dynamic phenomena.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be7eddf227074256650beb42fbdba2bd7543726a

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Computational Modeling of Realistic Cell Membranes (2019, background): “670 In fact, under crowded conditions, di ﬀ usion becomes anomalous 498,671 and may lead to deviations from the Sa ﬀ man-Delbruck model at physiological levels.”
Brownian yet non-Gaussian diffusion: from superstatistics to subordination of diffusing diffusivities (2016, background): “Possible generalizations may include diffusing diffusivity models with additional deterministic time dependence of the diffusivity [53] or non-Gaussian anomalous viscoelastic diffusion in crowded membranes [21], which contrasts Gaussian anomalous viscoelastic diffusion in noncrowded membranes [20].”