Hydrodynamic coupling of particle inclusions embedded in curved lipid bilayer membranes.

We develop theory and computational methods to investigate particle inclusions embedded within curved lipid bilayer membranes. We consider the case of spherical lipid vesicles where inclusion particles are coupled through (i) intramembrane hydrodynamics, (ii) traction stresses with the external and trapped solvent fluid, and (iii) intermonolayer slip between the two leaflets of the bilayer. We investigate relative to flat membranes how the membrane curvature and topology augment hydrodynamic responses. We show how both the translational and rotational mobility of protein inclusions are effected by the membrane curvature, ratio of intramembrane viscosity to solvent viscosity, and intermonolayer slip. For general investigations of many-particle dynamics, we also discuss how our approaches can be used to treat the collective diffusion and hydrodynamic coupling within spherical bilayers.

Dynamic implicit-solvent coarse-grained models of lipid bilayer membranes: fluctuating hydrodynamics thermostat.

We introduce a thermostat based on fluctuating hydrodynamics for dynamic simulations of implicit-solvent coarse-grained models of lipid bilayer membranes. We show our fluctuating hydrodynamics approach captures interesting correlations in the dynamics of lipid bilayer membranes that are missing in simulations performed using standard Langevin dynamics. Our momentum conserving thermostat accounts for solvent-mediated momentum transfer by coupling coarse-grained degrees of freedom to stochastic continuum fields that account for both the solvent hydrodynamics and thermal fluctuations. We present both a general framework and specific methods to couple the particle and continuum degrees of freedom in a manner consistent with statistical mechanics and amenable to efficient computational simulation. For self-assembled vesicles, we study the diffusivity of lipids and their spatial correlations. We find the hydrodynamic coupling yields within the bilayer interesting correlations between diffusing lipids that manifest as a vortex-like structure similar to those observed in explicit-solvent simulations. We expect the introduced fluctuating hydrodynamics methods to provide a way to extend implicit-solvent models for use in a wide variety of dynamic studies.