School of Physical Sciences
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Hydrodynamics of Three-Dimensional Multicomponent Vesicles
Prerna Gera
(University at Buffalo, Buffalo, USA)
Date: 24– May -2018
Time: 4 p.m, Thursday
Venue: Seminar Room, SPS
Abstract : A lipid vesicle is a body of fluid enclosed within a lipid bilayer membrane and can be used to model and study complex biological systems of interest such as cells and micro-capsules. The vesicle membrane protects the enclosed material and acts as the medium of communication between the intra- and extra-cellular environments. Irregularities of disruptions in the composition of the membrane can have an impact on fundamental cellular processes such as signal transduction, membrane trafficking, and membrane sorting. The membrane surface of a lipid vesicle is composed of saturated lipids that combine with cholesterol to form energetically stable domains are also known as the ordered phase. The ordered phase is surrounded by unsaturated lipids or the disordered phase. The presence of different lipid species with varying material properties such as bending rigidity produce a rich variety of shapes, patterns and dynamics as observed in experiments. In this work, a three-dimensional model is presented to explore the dynamics of multicomponent vesicles, both in the presence and absence of an externally driven fluid. The surface of the multicomponent membrane is modeled using a two-phase surface Cahn-Hilliard equation using a combined level set/closest point method. The multicomponent membrane is coupled to the surrounding fluid via a variation-of-energy approach. In this talk, sample results will be presented and compared to available experimental results. The spectrum of dynamics observed by this predictive model will be discussed and a systematic approach to investigate the influence of material properties of the underlying lipid species will be presented.