Where Biology Meets Physics—A Converging View on Membrane Microdomain Dynamics

Nanodomains in Biomembranes with Recycling

“…Before presenting our own model in detail, we rapidly review useful anterior approaches tackling the finite size of nano-clusters (see Refs. [10,20,26] for more details).…”

“…This is the so-called cluster phase mechanism [18]. The origin of the repulsion can be many-fold [10]. An efficient mechanism comes from the up-down symmetry breaking that a vast majority of proteins are supposed to impose to the membrane, leading to a local spontaneous membrane curvature [10].…”

“…The organization in nano-domains had been suspected for long, but a variety of super-resolution light microscopy techniques and atomic-force microscopy (AFM) have recently improved further our understanding of membrane supramolecular organization. They gave definitive evidence of the generic existence of nanometer sized functional domains on the cell membrane [2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10].…”

“…In order for the proteins to be condensed in a cluster phase, a generic attractive interaction at short range is required, the origin of which has been discussed in many works ( [6,10] and references therein). Two types of theoretical approaches have been developed to account for the finite size of protein clusters : (1) an effective long range repulsive potential between the proteins that prevents the creation of one big macrophase at equilibrium [18,19,21,22] and (2) far-from-equilibrium recycling of the cell membrane due to material exchange with the cytosol, that continually mixes the plasma membrane components and breaks large assemblies [23,24,25,26].…”

“…This article aims at developing a simplified biophysical model of the cell membrane describing the lateral distribution of embedded proteins and giving a realistic explanation of the formation of nano-clusters [10,20]. In order for the proteins to be condensed in a cluster phase, a generic attractive interaction at short range is required, the origin of which has been discussed in many works ( [6,10] and references therein).…”