title: A guiding potential method for evaluating the bending rigidity of tensionless lipid membranes from molecular simulation.
abstract: A new method is proposed to estimate the bending rigidity of lipid membranes from molecular dynamics simulations. An external cylindrical guiding potential is used to impose a sinusoidal deformation to a planar membrane. The bending rigidity is obtained from the mean force acting on the cylinder by calibrating against a discretized Helfrich model that accounts for thermal fluctuations of the membrane surface. The method has been successfully applied to a dimyristoyl phosphatidylcholine bilayer simulated with a coarse-grained model. A well-converged bending rigidity was obtained for the tension-free membrane and showed reasonable agreement with that obtained from the height fluctuation spectrum.
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 1-8-31 Midorigaoka, Ikeda, Osaka 563-8577, Japan. s.kawamoto@aist.go.jp
authors.forename: Shuhei
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kawamoto
authors.forename: Takenobu
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nakamura
authors.forename: Steven O
authors.initials: SO
authors.lastname: Nielsen
authors.forename: Wataru
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Shinoda