Effect of Gold Nanoparticle on Structure and Fluidity of Lipid Membrane

This paper deals with the effect of different size gold nanoparticles on the fluidity of lipid membrane at different regions of the bilayer. To investigate this, we have considered significantly large bilayer leaflets and incorporated only one nanoparticle each time, which was subjected to all atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. We have observed that, lipid molecules located near to the gold nanoparticle interact directly with it, which results in deformation of lipid structure and slower dynamics of lipid molecules. However, lipid molecules far away from the interaction site of the nanoparticle get perturbed, which gives rise to increase in local ordering of the lipid domains and decrease in fluidity. The bilayer thickness and area per head group in this region also get altered. Similar trend, but with different magnitude is also observed when different size nanoparticle interact with the bilayer.