Amphipathic Helices—Wedge? Or Nae Nae?

Abstract

Large-scale deformation of lipid membranes is essential to many cellular processes, including vesicular trafficking, organelle formation, and maintenance, and viral entry and exit. These processes are difficult to model, as they are inherently multiscale—i.e., molecular scale interactions manifest as membrane deformations with 100-nm lengthscales. A major challenge is therefore to determine the essential molecular details, so that more coarse-grained approaches (whether continuum- or particle-based) capture the correct biophysics.