<i>Bacillus subtilis</i> Lipid Extract, A Branched-Chain Fatty Acid Model Membrane

Lipid
extracts are an excellent choice of model biomembrane; however
at present, there are no commercially available lipid extracts or
computational models that mimic microbial membranes containing the
branched-chain fatty acids found in many pathogenic and industrially
relevant bacteria. We advance the extract of Bacillus subtilis as a standard model for these diverse systems, providing a detailed
experimental description and equilibrated atomistic bilayer model
included as Supporting Information to this Letter and at (http://cmb.ornl.gov/members/cheng). The development and validation of this model represents an advance
that enables more realistic simulations and experiments on bacterial
membranes and reconstituted bacterial membrane proteins.