Abstract

Water molecules on lipid membrane surfaces are known to contribute to membrane stability by connecting lipid molecules and acting as a water bridge. Although water structures and diffusivities near the membrane surfaces have been extensively studied, hydration dynamics on the surfaces has remained an open question. Here we investigate residence time statistics of water molecules on the surface of lipid membranes using all-atom molecular dynamics simulations. We show that hydration dynamics on the lipid membranes exhibits 1/f noise. Constructing a dichotomous process for the hydration dynamics, we find that residence times in each state follow a power-law with exponential cutoff and that the process can be regarded as a correlated renewal process where interoccurrence times are correlated. The results imply that the origin of the 1/f noise in hydration dynamics on the membrane surfaces is a combination of a power-law distribution with cutoff of interoccurrence times of switching events and a long-term correlation between the interoccurrence times. These results suggest that the 1/f noise attributed to the correlated renewal process may contribute to the stability of the hydration layers and lipid membranes.

Highlights

  • Water molecules on lipid membrane surfaces are known to contribute to membrane stability by connecting lipid molecules and acting as a water bridge

  • Constructing a dichotomous process for the hydration dynamics, we find that residence times in each state follow a power-law with exponential cutoff and that the process can be regarded as a correlated renewal process where interoccurrence times are correlated

  • To investigate the hydration dynamics on the lipid membrane surfaces, we recorded the number of water molecules for which the oxygen was within interatomic distances of 0.35 nm[38,41], which corresponds to the hydrogen bond distance, from all atoms in lipid head group [Fig. 1A]

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Summary

Introduction

Water molecules on lipid membrane surfaces are known to contribute to membrane stability by connecting lipid molecules and acting as a water bridge. The results imply that the origin of the 1/f noise in hydration dynamics on the membrane surfaces is a combination of a power-law distribution with cutoff of interoccurrence times of switching events and a long-term correlation between the interoccurrence times. These results suggest that the 1/f noise attributed to the correlated renewal process may contribute to the stability of the hydration layers and lipid membranes. We found that the residence times of water molecules on the lipid membrane surfaces follow power-law distributions[33,36]. By analyzing the constructed dichotomous process, we find that there is a long-term correlation between residence times, which contributes to the b . 1 at high frequencies

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