H. Jelger Risselada

TL;DR: An improved and extended version of the coarse grained lipid model is presented, coined the MARTINI force field, based on the reproduction of partitioning free energies between polar and apolar phases of a large number of chemical compounds to reproduce the free energies of these chemical building blocks.

TL;DR: The results demonstrate that electrostatic protein–lipid interactions can result in the formation of microdomains independently of cholesterol or lipid phases.

TL;DR: A simulation model is applied to assess the molecular nature of domains formed in ternary mixtures, showing the spontaneous separation of a saturated phosphatidylcholine (PC)/unsaturated PC/cholesterol mixture into a liquid-ordered and aLiquid-disordered phase with structural and dynamic properties closely matching experimental data.

TL;DR: This work investigates the molecular mechanism of monolayer collapse using molecular dynamics simulations and finds that transformation into a vesicle reduces the energy of the fold perimeter and is facilitated for softer bilayers, e.g., those with a higher content of unsaturated lipids, or at higher temperatures.

TL;DR: The results suggest that PIP2 clusters organized by syntaxin-1 act as molecular beacons for vesicle docking, with the subsequent Ca2+ influx bringing the vesicles membrane close enough for membrane fusion.