Stress Propagation through Biological Lipid-Bilayers Revealed by Atomistic and Coarse-Grained Simulations

Abstract

Membrane tension has been shown to play various critical roles in cell signaling. We here asked if and how pulses of local stress dynamically propagate through membranes, and propose this mechanism as a novel way of quickly propagating signals along the membrane.In both atomistic and coarse-grained MARTINI molecular dynamics simulations of biological lipid-bilayers, we observed short stress pulses to very efficiently propagate laterally at a velocity of the order of km/s, in close agreement with the expected speed of sound. The temperature dependence of pulse propagation shows tendencies very comparable to analogous experiments [1,2,3], with insightful differences between the atomistic and coarse-grained simulations. Remarkably, the propagation of the lateral stress was damped at length scales in the ∼100 nm range. Our data supports the notion of lateral stress propagation through membranes as a potential ultrafast way of short-range signal propagation in biology [4].[1] W. Schrader, et al. J. Phys. Chem. B. 106:6581-6586 (2002)[2] S. Shrivastava S and MF Schneider. J. R. Soc. Interface 11:20140098 (2014).[3] J. Kappler and R. Netz. EPL. 112: 19002 (2015)[4] C. Aponte-Santamaria and F. Grater. In preparation