514 Meso-scale Analysis of Lipid Bilayers

Abstract

We present a meso-scale simulation of lipid bilayers by the Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) method. We investigate the undulation spectrum of the lipid bilayers. In order to understand the effect of the resolution which captures the fluctuation of the interface and the size of the membrane area, we calculate several cases with different resolutions and with different size of the simulation cell. The results we obtained are summarized as follows; 1) The spectral distribution is proportional to q^<-4> (q is the wave number) for low q values. This implies that the continuum picture is valid for low q values. 2) The resolution of the interface affects the spectral intensity for high q values, although does not affect for low q values. 3) The spectral intensity does not altered significantly by the size of simulation cell in our simulation conditions.