Selective aggregation of membrane proteins by membrane-mediated interactions

Abstract

There are different types of membrane proteins in a cellular membrane, and most of them must correctly assemble into appropriate clusters for their cellular functions. In this work, we suggest a physical mechanism for selective aggregation of different membrane proteins without specific protein-protein attraction by dissipative particle dynamics method. A membrane-mediated interaction may result in different protein clusters with ideal mixing, nonideal mixing and demixing of different types of membrane proteins, depending on the extent of the similarity of membrane deformations by those proteins.