Intrinsic Disorder and Degeneracy in Molecular Scale Organization of Biological Membrane

Abstract

The scale-rich spatiotemporal organization in biological membrane dictates the \"molecular encounter\" and in turn the larger scale biological processes such as molecular transport, trafficking and cellular signalling. In this work, we explore the degeneracy in lateral organization in lipid bilayer systems from the perspective of energy landscape theory. Our analysis on molecular trajectories show that bilayers with lipids having in-vivo characteristics have a highly frustrated energy landscape as opposed to a funnel-like energy landscape in in-vitro systems. Lattice evolution simulations, with Hamiltonian trained from atomistic trajectories using lipids topology and non-affine displacement measures to characterize the extent of order-disorder in the bilayer, show that the inherent frustration in in-vivo like systems renders them with the ability to access a wide range of nanoscale patterns with equivalent energy penalty. We posit that this structural degeneracy could provide for a larger repository to functionally important molecular organization in in-vivo settings.