THURSDAY, Oct. 25th, 12 p.m. 11th Floor Gamov Tower
Ashok Prasad
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hydrodynamics and Macromolecule Dynamics in Flatland
Lipid bilayer membranes form the outer coverings of cells and of vesicles and organelles within cells. They are also emerging as systems of considerable importance in the laboratory, and have many potentially important technological applications in synthetic biology. An area of active current research concerns understanding the dynamics of macromolecules in these membranes. In this talk I'll first discuss the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers, and show that the quasi-two dimensional nature of these membranes lead to some interesting hydrodynamic effects. I'll then examine the effect of the hydrodynamics on the dynamics of polymers in these membranes by constructing a theoretical bead-on-spring polymer model that takes hydrodynamic interactions and self-avoidance into account. I'll show that the hydrodynamics has some interesting consequences for the diffusion constant of polymers, and speculate on its role in creating heterogeneities in real cell membranes.