Carnegie Mellon develops computer model to study cell membran...(ttles a cell couldnt survive. ...)

Ultimately, understanding the dynamics of vesiculation is key to advancing the design of anti-viral therapies or understanding how protein processing goes awry within a cell and leads to disease, Deserno said.

Deserno and his team created a computer simulation of a cell membrane with a lipid bilayer a soap-like film made of 50,000 individual lipids molecules and studded it with 36 evenly spaced and contact lens-shaped disks representing remodeling proteins, which are involved in vesiculation. Then he set the simulation to allow the fluid membrane to fluctuate as it normally would. During the simulation, the artificial membrane began curving in places. In creating curved membrane structures, each disk bent the membrane slightly. This local curvature spread around a disk like a little halo. When two disks approached one another, the overlapping halos led to an indirect interaction. Thus, while there was no explicit interaction between the disks, these objects indirectly attracted each other via the membrane, Desernos group found.

With this work, we provide solid support for a mechanism that has been gaining in popularity recently, Deserno said. To date, no one has demonstrated at the biophysical level exactly what most people have come to accept as evident that remodeling proteins can indeed aggregate and facilitate vesiculation based on their curvature imprint alone. Our simulations show that proteins need not interact directly to drive this critical process.

Understanding how vesiculation physically operates should make it easier in the long run to rationally design and deliver drugs to individual cells, according to Deserno. This is the biggest practical value of our research. Now that we have a proposed mechanism, we can subject it to well-posed questions, such as why certain proteins are always present during vesiculation.

In addition to investigating the pr
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