Dr. Jan Siewert Marrink
Department of Biophysical Chemistry
University of Groningen
The Netherlands

Tuesday, October 4, 2005
10:30 am (CT)
3269 Beckman Institute

Abstract

The phase behaviour of lipid systems is very rich and complex. The cell uses the ability of lipid membranes to undergo phase separation or to adopt non-lamellar geometries in a number of fundamental biophysical processes such as raft- formation, vesicle fusion, or membrane poration and lysis. Over the past few years it has become feasible to study a variety of such phase transformation processes using molecular dynamics simulation techniques. I will give some recent examples, using coarse grained models as well as atomistic force fields.