Start
Jun 11, 2018 - 14:30
End
Jun 11, 2018 - 15:30
Venue
Room 235 Chemical Engg Dept
Event Type
Speaker
Dr. Prerna Gera SUNY Buffalo USA
Title
Dynamics of three-dimensional multicomponent vesicles and influence of material properties
Abstract: Biological cells have a bilayer membrane that protects the enclosed material and acts as a medium of communication between the intra- and extra-cellular environments. Variation in the composition of the membrane have shown to impact fundamental cellular processes such as signal transduction membrane tracking and membrane sorting. The inhomogeneous membranes of living cells have a complex and a dynamic structure and thus the simplified membrane model system of lipid vesicles is significant. The membrane surface of a lipid vesicle is composed of saturated lipids that combine with cholesterol to form energetically stable domains also known as the ordered phase. The ordered phase is surrounded by unsaturated lipids or the disordered phase. The presence of different lipid species with varying material properties such as bending rigidity produce a rich variety of shapes patterns and dynamics as observed in experiments. In this work a three-dimensional multicomponent vesicle model is developed to study the dynamics in presence and absence of an externally driven fluid. The surface of the multicomponent membrane is modeled using a two-phase surface Cahn-Hilliard equation using a combined level set/closest point method. The multicomponent membrane is coupled to the surrounding fluid via a variation-of-energy approach. In this talk sample results will be presented and compared to available experimental results. The spectrum of dynamics observed by this predictive model will be discussed and a systematic approach to investigate the influence of material properties of the underlying lipid species will be presented.Bio: Prerna Gera is a research scientist at SUNY Buffalo in the Mechanical Engineering department and will be joining as a Van Vleck Visiting Assistant Professor in the Mathematics department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology Masters and a PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering from University at Buffalo where her thesis was supervised by Professor David Salac. Her research focus is on development and investigation of a predictive model for a fully coupled three-dimensional multicomponent vesicle present in an aqueous medium.