Cholesterol modulates membrane elasticity via unified biophysical laws.

ABSTRACT: Cholesterol and lipid unsaturation underlie a balance of opposing forces that features prominently in adaptive cell responses to diet and environmental cues. These competing factors have resulted in contradictory observations of membrane elasticity across different measurement scales, requiring chemical specificity to explain incompatible structural and elastic effects. Here, we demonstrate that - unlike macroscopic observations - lipid membranes exhibit a unified elastic behavior in the mesoscopic regime between molecular and macroscopic dimensions. Using nuclear spin techniques and computational analysis, we find that mesoscopic bending moduli follow a universal dependence on the lipid packing density regardless of cholesterol content, lipid unsaturation, or temperature. Our observations

SUBMITTER: Kumarage T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12313887 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature