To describe the hydrophobic adsorption of charged molecules to bilayer membranes, one must recognize that the adsorption produces a change in the electrostatic potential at the surface of the membrane. The surface potential produced by the adsorption of the charged molecules can be described most simply by the Gouy equation from the theory of the diffuse double layer. This potential will tend to lower the concentration of the adsorbing ions in the aqueous phase immediately adjacent to the membrane, a phenomenon which can be described by the Boltzmann relation. The number of adsorbed ions is, in turn, a function of the aqueous concentration of these ions at the membrane solution interface and can be described, in the simplest case, by a Langmuir adsorption isotherm. If the ions are regarded as point charges, the combination of the Gouy, Boltzmann, and Langmuir relations may be considered a simplified Stern equation. To test experimentally the applicability of this equation, one should measure both the charge density and surface potential as a function of the concentration of adsorbing molecules in the bulk aqueous phases. Direct, accurate measurements of one of these parameters, the number of moles of 2, 6-toluidinylnaphthalenesulfonate ions bound to vesicles formed from phosphatidylcholine, are available in the literature (Huang, C., and Charlton, J.P. (1972), Biochemistry 11, 735). We estimated the change in the surface potential in two independent ways; by means of conductance measurements with "probe" molecules on planar black lipid membranes and by means of electrophoresis measurements on multilaminar unsonicated vesicles. The two estimates agreed with one another and all of the data could be adequately described by the Stern equation, assuming, at 25 degrees C, a dissociation constant of 2 X 10(-4) M and a maximum number of binding sites of 1/70 A2.

There is now good evidence that most of the lipids in a biological membrane are arranged in the form of a bilayer. Charged lipids in the membrane of an excitable cell are subject to a significant driving force, the gradient of the intramembrane potential, which will tend to redistribute the lipids between the two halves of the bilayer by a "phospholipid flip-flop" mechanism. We have calculated, by combining the Boltzmann relation from statistics and the Gouy equation from the theory of the diffuse double layer, the steady-state distribution of charged lipids in the bilayer. This distribution is completely determined, within the framework of the model, by three experimentally accessible variables; the percentage of charged lipid in the bilayer as a whole, the resting potential and the ionic strength. The known values for the percentage of anionic phospholipids in squid axons (10-15%), the membrane potential (50-100 mV) and ionic strength (0.5 M) imply that the charge density and double layer potential at the outer surface of the nerve will be substantially greater than the charge density and double layer potential at the inner surface, in agreement with the best available evidence from physiological measurements.