Abstract
Theoretically predicted by Fisher and de Gennes in 1978, critical Casimir forces are the thermodynamic analogues of the Casimir-Polder attraction forces due to quantum fluctuations of confined electromagnetic field in vacuum. In the context of lipid membranes close to a miscibility transition, critical Casimir interactions are thought to be responsible for clustering of membrane proteins. Here we explore the hypothesis that these effective statistical-field mediated interactions can explain the observed ion channel cooperativity that has been suggested to promote multistability of the membrane potential and thus “cellular memory”.
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