Smart Nano-objects for Alteration of Lipid bilayers (SNAL) Initial Training Network is a multidisciplinary EU-funded 7th Framework Programme specially designed to provide scientific and transferable skill training and career development for early stage researchers and experienced researchers in the field of lipid research.

People ProjectsMethodsEventsNews & Media

Work on a similar topic?
Contact us

ESR4-D: Molecular dynamics simulations of lipid bilayers and their interactions with nano-objects

Theoretical physics, theory in soft matter, computer simulations

Contact

Chanfei Su

Objectives

The challenge of this project is to understand the role of molecular properties of self-organized phosphor-lipid bilayers on the interaction behaviour with nano-objects such as spherical nanoparticles, stiff rods and protein-like copolymers:

  • Implementing an appropriately coarse-grained model for bilayer membranes based on highly parallelized LAMPS-code.
  • Dynamics of lipids and extension to multi-component membranes consisting of lipids and cholesterol-like molecules.
  • Analysing the effects of charge and stiffness of lipids on the effective interaction potentials with nano-objects.
  • Understanding the influence of nano-objects on permeation, rupture and pore-formation.

Tasks and methodology

  • Implementing suitable coarse-grained models on LAMMPS using highly parallelized code and GPU-implementations. Simulating interactions with individual and many nano-objects.
  • Implementing electrostatic interactions and physiological environments (ionic strength) using most efficient algorithms and comparing various approaches. Implementing and developing methods to calculated effective interaction models between membranes and nano-objects.

Starting date

September 2014

Methods and techniques

Related research topics

Chanfei Su

Leave a Reply