Research investigating lipid membrane curvature generation and sensing is a rapidly developing frontier in membrane physical chemistry and biophysics. The fast recent progress is based on the discovery of a plethora of proteins involved in coupling membrane shape to cellular membrane function, the design of new quantitative experimental techniques to study aspects of membrane curvature, and the development of analytical theories and simulation techniques that allow a mechanistic interpretation of quantitative measurements. The present review first provides an overview of important classes of membrane proteins for which function is coupled to membrane curvature. We then survey several mechanisms that are assumed to underlie membrane curvature sensing and generation. Finally, we discuss relatively simple thermodynamic/mechanical models that allow quantitative interpretation of experimental observations. © 2011 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved.

Sovan Lal 	 Das

Department of Mechanical Engineering

T. Baumgart

B.R. Capraro

C. Zhu

Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

Annual Review of Physical Chemistry

Cell membrane proteins, both bound and integral, are known to preferentially accumulate at membrane locations with curvatures favorable to their shape. This is mainly due to the curvature dependent interaction between membrane proteins and their lipid environment. Here, we analyze the effects of the protein-lipid bilayer interaction energy due to mismatch between the protein shape and the principal curvatures of the surrounding bilayer. The role of different macroscopic parameters that define the interaction energy term is elucidated in relation to recent experiment in which the lateral distribution of a membrane embedded protein potassium channel KvAP is measured on a giant unilamellar lipid vesicle (reservoir) and a narrow tubular extension-a tether-kept at constant length. The dependence of the sorting ratio, defined as the ratio between the areal density of the protein on the tether and on the vesicle, on the inverse tether radius is influenced by the strength of the interaction, the intrinsic shape of the membrane embedded protein, and its abundance in the reservoir. It is described how the values of these constants can be extracted from experiments. The intrinsic principal curvatures of a protein are related to the tether radius at which the sorting ratio attains its maximum value. The estimate of the principal intrinsic curvature of the protein KvAP, obtained by comparing the experimental and theoretical sorting behavior, is consistent with the available information on its structure. © 2015 The Royal Society of Chemistry.

Journal	Annual Review of Physical Chemistry
Publisher	Annual Reviews Inc.
ISSN	0066426X
Open Access	No