Computational Modeling of Realistic Cell Membranes

By Siewert-Jan Marrink, Valentina Corradi, Paulo C. T. Souza, Helgi I. Ingólfsson, D. Peter Tieleman, M. Sansom. Chemical Reviews, 2019

579 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cell membranes contain a large variety of lipid types and are crowded with proteins, endowing them with the plasticity needed to fulfill their key roles in cell functioning. The compositional complexity of cellular membranes gives rise to a heterogeneous lateral organization, which is still poorly understood. Computational models, in particular molecular dynamics simulations and related techniques, have provided important insight into the organizational principles of cell membranes over the past decades. Now, we are witnessing a transition from simulations of simpler membrane models to multicomponent systems, culminating in realistic models of an increasing variety of cell types and organelles. Here, we review the state of the art in the field of realistic membrane simulations and discuss the current limitations and challenges ahead.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa1e0ce105fe9c51474faadcaf2b37556d2ad5b3

Citations in the corpus

• Protein Structure Prediction and Design in a Biologically Realistic Implicit Membrane. (2020, unknown): “With current technology, detailed all-atom models can be used to explore membrane dynamics for hundreds of nanoseconds (14): the timescale required to achieve equilibrated properties on a bilayer with 250 lipids (15).”