![]() Through this process, it is also involved in the formation of highly ordered nano-scale membrane domains called lipid rafts, which play an important role in numerous cellular functions. It increases the order of fluid-phase phospholipid acyl chains, giving rise to the formation of the liquid-ordered (lo) phase. It largely determines permeability, fluidity, and mechanical properties of the membranes. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Ĭholesterol (Chol) is the most common lipid component in animal cell membranes. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: Financial support was provided by the Secretaría de Estado de Educación, Universidades, Investigación y Desarrollo through project FIS200603525 (HMS, RR), by the Departament d'Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informació through project 2009-SGR1055 (HMS, RR), by the Academy of Finland (TR, IV), and by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council and SharcNet of Canada (MK). Received: MaAccepted: Published: June 17, 2010Ĭopyright: © 2010 Martinez-Seara et al. PLoS ONE 5(6):Įditor: Neeraj Vij, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, United States of America Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.Citation: Martinez-Seara H, Róg T, Karttunen M, Vattulainen I, Reigada R (2010) Cholesterol Induces Specific Spatial and Orientational Order in Cholesterol/Phospholipid Membranes. Permission is not required) please go to the Copyright If you want to reproduce the wholeĪrticle in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figuresĪnd diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. Provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission Please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page. To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, Provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes. This article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, Overall, our simulations support ideas that there can be a subtle interconnection between the contents of highly unsaturated fatty acids and cholesterol, deficiency or excess of each of them is related to many human afflictions and diseases.Ĭholesterol in phospholipid bilayers: positions and orientations inside membranes with different unsaturation degreesĬreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. Furthermore, cholesterol molecules in this bilayer are often found to form head-to-tail contacts which may lead to specific clustering behaviour. This bilayer has also the highest (least negative) binding free energy among liquid phase bilayers, and the lowest reorientation barrier. In this bilayer, cholesterol is relatively often found in a “flipped” configuration with the hydroxyl group oriented towards the membrane middle plane. Both molecular dynamics and metadynamics simulations showed that the most unsaturated bilayer with 22:6 fatty acid chains shows behaviour which is most different from other lipids. From these simulations we have determined distributions of cholesterol across the bilayer, its orientational properties, free energy profiles, and specific interactions of molecular groups able to form hydrogen bonds. In order to get detailed atomistic insight into the behaviour of cholesterol in bilayers composed of lipids with varying degrees of unsaturation, we have carried out a series of molecular dynamics simulations of saturated and polyunsaturated lipid bilayers with different contents of cholesterol, as well as well-tempered metadynamics simulations with a single cholesterol molecule in these bilayers. The presence of cholesterol is believed to be responsible for domain formation (lipid rafts) due to different interactions of cholesterol with saturated and unsaturated lipids. Cholesterol is an essential component of all animal cell membranes and plays an important role in maintaining the membrane structure and physical–chemical properties necessary for correct cell functioning.
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