| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
ICHINOSE Hiroyuki Saga Medical School, Department of General Education, Assistant, 医学部, 教務員 (10232406)
TAKEFU Masasuke Saga Medical School, Department of General Education, Professor, 医学部, 教授 (30207005)
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| Research Abstract |
We have received the grant in aide from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology for four years from 1998 to 2001 by the title of "Theoretical research on the static and dynamic structure of lipid membranes". This theme is not a major field in the physical Society of Japan and the population of the research workers in Japan is not so big. In western countries, such interdisciplinary fields are much more promoted than those in Japan. However, our theme is import in the field of biophysics and we acknowledge Japanese government for giving us the grant to perform our interdisciplinary research work.
Under the strong support of this grant, we first performed the theoretical work on the formation of nano-scale regular cluster on the Langmuir trough based on the electrostatic principle, which explained the observed two dimensional nano-cluster made of ionic surfactants. The point is that the regular cluster pattern of ionic surfactants is more preferable than the two
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-dimensional uniform distribution of ions. The analysis showed the qualitative agreement with the observed data.
Next, we analyzed the shapes of the cup-like lipid vesicles formed by adding small amount of protein, talin. By combining the mechanics of cup-like vesicles and statistical mechanics of adsorption, we succeeded to explain well the observed data. However, the shapes of observed cup-like vesicles were regarded as partial sphere as a first order approximation. More detailed Monte Carlo simulation has also been done to reproduced the precise shapes and the local force balance of not only cup-like vesicles but also cylindrical vesicles. More numerical analysis is now going on as to make further investigation.
In general, anesthetic action is non-specific and the anesthetic effect is strongly correlated to the partition coefficient of anesthetics from water to membrane. Dr. Petrov in Bulgarian Academy of Science and Suezaki evaluated the effect of anesthetics to the ion channel in the nerve membrane via changing the stress profiles of membrane inside. Although we cannot find out the experimental evidence of the stress profiles of membrane inside, we showed the theoretical importance of it through the effect of anesthetic action. Less
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