Pin the Protein on the Membrane: Using Numerical Simulations to Explore Membrane-Protein Systems

Abstract

The structure of the membrane gives rise to important biological phenomena. In this dissertation we focus on the shape of the membrane and its interactions through two different coupling schemes to membrane bound proteins. We develop a model based on the continuum description of the membrane that is used to investigate height-coupled and curvature-coupled membrane-protein systems. For these systems we use coupled Langevin equations to model the dynamics for the Fourier modes of the membrane and protein position in the xy-plane. We investigate similarities and differences in these two coupling schemes in how they alter membrane fluctuations, protein-protein interactions, and lateral protein diffusion. We further expand on previous dynamic membrane-protein models by deriving from the Fokker-Planck formalism a consistent Langevin equations that accurately models the dynamics of systems with protein diffusing along the membrane surface. We investigate how the model differs from previous in the discussion of later protein diffusion.