Rupture of biological cell membrane under mechanical stresses is critical for cell viability. It is triggered by local rearrangements of membrane molecules. We investigated the effects of stretching speed on mechanical rupture of phospholipid/cholesterol bilayers using unsteady molecular dynamics simulations. We focused on pore formation, the trigger of rupture, in a 40 mol% cholesterol-including bilayer. The unsteady stretching was modeled by proportional and temporal scaling of atom positions at stretching speeds from 0.025 to 30 m/s. The effects of the stretching speed on the critical areal strain, where the pore forms, is composed of two regimes. At low speeds (<1.0 m/s), the critical areal strain is insensitive to speed, whereas it significantly increases at higher speeds. Also, the strain is larger than that of a pure bilayer, regardless of the stretching speeds, which qualitatively agrees with available experimental data. Transient recovery of the cholesterol and phospholipid molecular orientations was evident at lower speeds, suggesting the formation of a stretch-induced interdigitated gel-like phase. However, this recovery was not confirmed at higher speeds or for the pure bilayer. The different responses of the molecular orientations may help explain the two regimes for the effect of stretching speed on pore formation.

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An essential step of nanoliposome formation in an aqueous lipid solution is the transition from discoidal lipid aggregate (bicelle) to vesicle. We investigate here the bicelle-to-vesicle transition of a binary lipid mixture of saturated and unsaturated phosphatidylcholine by performing nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations with the coarse-grained representation of di-palmitoyl-phosphatidyl-choline (DPPC) and dilinoleoyl-phosphatidyl-choline (DLiPC). When the DPPC molecules of a stable DPPC bicelle are randomly replaced with the DLiPC molecules, the transition occurs for higher apparent DLiPC concentrations. On the other hand, when the DPPC molecules only in the core region of the bicelle are replaced, the transition occurs even for lower apparent DLiPC concentrations. For the bicelle where the head and tail layers are pure DPPC and DLiPC monolayers, respectively, the side of the DLiPC monolayer becomes the concave surface of bending bicelle. Controlling the local lipid compositions in a binary lipid bicelle has the potential to determine the success of vesicle formation and the direction of bicelle bending. Our findings help explain nanoliposome formation with sonication and give useful information for controlling encapsulation efficiencies of nanoliposomes.

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The line tension of the pore in a phospholipid bilayer is important for pore-mediated molecular transport techniques. To understand the cholesterol effects on the line tension of the pore edge at the molecular level, we perform molecular dynamics simulations of phospholipid bilayers with a pore containing cholesterol in different concentrations (0, 20, and 40 mol%). The bilayer with a pore is prepared by using an equibiaxial stretching simulation. The stretched bilayer with a pore is subsequently compressed and the pore spontaneously closes when the applied areal strain of the bilayer is below a certain value. Using the pore closure areal strain and a free energy model of a stretched bilayer with a pore, the upper and lower limits of the line tensions for the bilayers containing cholesterol at 0, 20, and 40 mol% are estimated to be 17.0-48.2, 54.5-100, and 170-261 pN, respectively. The increasing tendency of the line tension qualitatively agrees with that observed experimentally. The pores in the cholesterol-containing bilayers are lined with several cholesterol molecules, which might increase the bending rigidity of the pore edge, and result in the higher line tension of the cholesterol-containing bilayer. The considerable dependency of the line tension on the bilayer compositions might be useful to explain the large variations of the transduction efficiency observed with sonoporation treatment.

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In this paper, the importance of implementing good acoustic conditions in classrooms using sound amplification systems is investigated to support more effective English education for elementary school children. To date, the failure of educating English as a second language at Japanese schools has been demonstrated by poor English conversation ability of those who completed a compulsory six-year English language course at Japanese junior-high and high schools (age 12–18). To amend the situation, teaching English became compulsory at grade three (age 8–9) and above at most Japanese elementary schools in the 2020 academic year. We conducted acoustic measurements of two types of sound amplification systems, a pair of PC loudspeakers and another with a loudspeaker array, in a typical classroom at an elementary school in Japan. We also analysed English listening test results of 216 Japanese native children (age 11–12) who were learning English in their usual classes in Japan, to compare the effects of those two systems. Results of logistic regression analysis adjusted by the discrimination difficulty of word pairs demonstrated the statistically significant association between correct answer rate of the English tests and classroom acoustic factors. Although, on average, upgrading the sound amplification system had positive effects on the correct answer rate, it also had a negative impact when the word pairs had English phoneme contrasts that do not appear in Japanese phoneme structure. Combined with the acoustic measurements’ results, it was also revealed that heterogeneous sound fields that depend on seat positions could be compensated using sound amplification systems with loudspeaker arrays. Our findings suggest that improvement of both acoustic quality and teaching methods is required for children to acquire English communication skills effectively in their classroom.

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