Membrane Mediated Aggregation of Nanoparticle (NP): A Study with the help of an Implicit-Solvent, Soft Interacting Mesoscale Model
ABSTRACT :
Fluid membranes occur in a wide variety of physical, chemical and biological systems. They envelope Eucaryotic cell and compartmen-talize di erent subcellular regions called cell organelles, which takes characteristic shapes according to the processes they encounter. The large percentage of the membrane in cell and membrane bound cell or-ganelles have crucial role in cell-to-cell, cell-to-matrix and extracellular to intracellular communication. So far, there is no clear understand-ing on how cells maintain the shapes of organelles. Recent works on such a system suggest that budding and fusion of vesicles and protein binding and unbinding play a major role in generating and stabiliz-ing the shapes of membrane bound organelles. It is also found that,upon adhesion or inclusion of nano particles (NPs) on organelles, it's morphology changes drastically. This has many promising biomedi-cal apllications in biosensing, medical imaging, gene therapy, targeted drug-delivery design and nanotoxicity studies. Here, we propose to use Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations for studying the membrane mediated aggregation of NPs of varying size, shape and density on a tensionless uid bilayer membranes.