Mark A. Peletier,
Centre for Analysis, Scientific computing and Applications, TUE, Eindhoven

Title: "Understanding the stability of lipid bilayers"

Abstract:
Lipid bilayers are a central building block of the living cell. They make up the 
membranes that shield the inside of the cell from the outside, and that surround 
the various organelles such as the nucleus and mitochondria. I want to focus on 
a striking aspect of these large, organized structures: although individual 
molecules are not bound to each other in any way, still the structure as a whole 
is remarkably stable. In fact such membranes even have properties that we 
associate with solids, such as resistance to bending, stretching, and fracture.

In this talk I will sketch how these solid-like properties can be connected to 
the properties of the lipids themselves. The main tool is a scaling approach, in 
which we zoom out and take a limit of zero thickness of the membrane. In this 
limit we can identify the resistance to bending, stretching, and fracture, and 
thus understand their relation to the stability of lipid bilayers.