Země: Slovenia Poskytovatel: NaMeS Project

Current status: Biological membranes are multicomponent two dimensional fluids. The phospholipids form a bilayer where many different components such as proteins or hydrocarbons are embedded. The behaviour of proteins in biological membranes is still not sufficiently understood. Biological functions of proteins may be modified by their local concentration. The shape of the membrane may depend on the local concentration of components but also the concentration of components may be influenced by the membrane curvature. Inspiration for these studies comes from the publication co-authored by W. Gozdz and A. Iglic in PLoS ONE 8(9) , e73941, (2013) and from publication of W. Gozdz group in J. Chem. Phys., 137(1), 015101, (2012). The goal: To better understand the physics of multicomponent biological membranes, and to elucidate, how the distribution of different kinds of components influences membrane properties and biological functions, related to differences in the local concentration of components. To describe (experimentally and theoretically) the interaction of biological membranes with nanoparticles and nanostructured surfaces, with the possible application in biomedicine. Our approach: We will construct and investigate free energy functionals where the geometry of the biological membrane will be taken into account. Such approach combines knowledge from: physics (statistical mechanics), mathematics (differential geometry), biology (lipid membranes & biological cells), material science (fabrication of nanostructures), and computer science (numerical minimization, low level programming).We plan the collaboration with a Slovenian company Sensum d.o.o. (www.hellotrade.com) on the automatic determination of blood cell shapes for diagnostic purposes.