Geometry of lipid vesicle adhesion

The Helfrich functional, denoted by H^{c_0}, is a mathematical expression proposed by Helfrich (1973) for the natural free energy carried by an elastic phospholipid bilayer. Helfrich theorises that idealised elastic phospholipid bilayers minimise H^{c_0} among all possible configurations. The functional integrates a spontaneous curvature parameter c_0 together with the mean curvature of the bilayer and constraints on area and volume, either through an inclusion of osmotic pre...

Lipid vesicles appear ubiquitously in biological systems. Understanding how the mechanical and intermolecular interations deform vesicle membrane is a fundamental question in biophysics. In this article we developed a fast algorithm to compute the surface configurations of lipid vesicles by introducing the surface harmonic functions to approximate the surfaces. This parameterization of the surfaces allows an analytical computation of the membrane curvature energy and its grad...

Consider a homogenous fluid membrane described by the Helfrich-Canham energy, quadratic in the mean curvature of the membrane surface. The shape equation that determines equilibrium configurations is fourth order in derivatives and cubic in the mean curvature. We introduce a Hamiltonian formulation of this equation which dismantles it into a set of coupled first order equations. This involves interpreting the Helfrich-Canham energy as an action; equilibrium surfaces are gener...

The Helfrich bending energy plays an important role in providing a mechanism for the conformation of a lipid vesicle in theoretical biophysics, which is governed by the principle of energy minimization over configurations of appropriate topological characteristics. We will show that the presence of a quantity called the spontaneous curvature obstructs the existence of a minimizer of the Helfrich energy over the set of embedded ring tori. Besides, despite the well-realized kno...

Lipid bilayer membranes are commonly modeled as area-preserving fluid surfaces that resist bending. There appear to be two schools of thought in the literature concerning the actual area constraint. In some works the total or global area (GA) of the vesicle is a prescribed constant, while in others the local area ratio is assigned to unity. In this work we demonstrate the equivalence of these ostensibly distinct approaches in the specific case when the equilibrium configurati...

An exact description is provided of an almost spherical fluid vesicle with a fixed area and a fixed enclosed volume locally deformed by external normal forces bringing two nearby points on the surface together symmetrically. The conformal invariance of the two-dimensional bending energy is used to identify the distribution of energy as well as the stress established in the vesicle. While these states are local minima of the energy, this energy is degenerate; there is a zero m...

Motivated by recent studies of two-phase lipid vesicles possessing 2D solid domains integrated within a fluid bilayer phase, we study the shape equilibria of closed vesicles possessing a single planar, circular inclusion. While 2D solid elasticity tends to expel Gaussian curvature, topology requires closed vesicles to maintain an average, non-zero Gaussian curvature leading to an elementary mechanism of shape frustration that increases with inclusion size. We study elastic gr...

Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Amphiphilic molecules and the phases they form 3. Isolated membranes: the Helfrich hamiltonian 4. Vesicle shapes 5. Shape fluctuations in vesicles 6. Interacting fluid membranes 7. Conclusions A. Differential equations for vesicle shapes B. The Faddeev-Popov determinant C. One-loop calculation of the renormalization group D. The Liouville model

By means of Surface Evolver (Exp. Math,1,141 1992), a software package of brute-force energy minimization over a triangulated surface developed by the geometry center of University of Minnesota, we have numerically searched the non-axisymmetric shapes under the Helfrich spontaneous curvature (SC) energy model. We show for the first time there are abundant mechanically stable non-axisymmetric vesicles in SC model, including regular ones with intrinsic geometric symmetry and co...

Measurements with an atomic force microscope (AFM) offer a direct way to probe elastic properties of lipid bilayer membranes locally: provided the underlying stress-strain relation is known, material parameters such as surface tension or bending rigidity may be deduced. In a recent experiment a pore-spanning membrane was poked with an AFM tip, yielding a linear behavior of the force-indentation curves. A theoretical model for this case is presented here which describes these ...