Collaborative Research: Emergent Dynamics and Scaling Laws in Bioinspired Lipid Membranes

Non-Technical Abstract: Cell membranes are sophisticated soft material assemblies that are crucial to biological function and technological applications. They exhibit diverse functionalities that are shaped by the molecular architectures of their lipid and sterol building blocks. To understand membrane functions and design related technologies, it is essential to determine how variations in molecular compositions govern membrane behavior across different functional scales. In this project, a team of researchers combine experimental and computational methods to determine how molecular forces – dictated by lipid and sterol chemistries – control the material properties of membranes on various scales of size and time. The broad aim is to simplify the complex relations between membrane structure and behavior by discovering physical laws that capture non-intuitive and often contradictory observations. This research has important implementations in understanding the role of membrane properties in health and disease and driving new innovations in artificial cells, biosensors, and drug delivery methods. Technical Abstract: Replicating the multifunctionality of cell membranes is a significant focus in synthetic biology, artificial cell technologies, and biosensing applications. To achieve this goal requires knowledge of how lipid and sterol variations – such as modifications in sterol structures and changes in lipid headgroups or acyl chains – affect molecular interactions and membrane dynamics. In addressing such pressing scientific needs, the project aims to uncover the physical principles underlying structure-property relationships in biomimetic cell membranes across multiple spatiotemporal scales. It integrates experimental methods including neutron spectroscopy, solid-state deuterium NMR relaxometry, and Flicker spectroscopy with molecular dynamics simulations to establish the connection between structural descriptors, emergent dynamics, and viscoelastic properties on molecular, mesoscopic, and macroscopic levels. By specifically focusing on mesoscopic dynamics, which remain poorly understood, the project fills a critical information gap in membrane biophysics. Quantifying how various dynamic modes are affected by lipid architecture or sterol content is directly relevant to biological functions and bioengineering. These findings promise to enrich our understanding of membrane evolution, guide the design of lipidic materials with tailored functionalities, and advance computational biophysics by providing training data sets for simulation tools and machine-learning algorithms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.