Please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page. To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, Provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes. This article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, Overall, our simulations support ideas that there can be a subtle interconnection between the contents of highly unsaturated fatty acids and cholesterol, deficiency or excess of each of them is related to many human afflictions and diseases.Ĭholesterol in phospholipid bilayers: positions and orientations inside membranes with different unsaturation degreesĬreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. Furthermore, cholesterol molecules in this bilayer are often found to form head-to-tail contacts which may lead to specific clustering behaviour. This bilayer has also the highest (least negative) binding free energy among liquid phase bilayers, and the lowest reorientation barrier. In this bilayer, cholesterol is relatively often found in a “flipped” configuration with the hydroxyl group oriented towards the membrane middle plane. Both molecular dynamics and metadynamics simulations showed that the most unsaturated bilayer with 22:6 fatty acid chains shows behaviour which is most different from other lipids.

From these simulations we have determined distributions of cholesterol across the bilayer, its orientational properties, free energy profiles, and specific interactions of molecular groups able to form hydrogen bonds.

In order to get detailed atomistic insight into the behaviour of cholesterol in bilayers composed of lipids with varying degrees of unsaturation, we have carried out a series of molecular dynamics simulations of saturated and polyunsaturated lipid bilayers with different contents of cholesterol, as well as well-tempered metadynamics simulations with a single cholesterol molecule in these bilayers.

The presence of cholesterol is believed to be responsible for domain formation (lipid rafts) due to different interactions of cholesterol with saturated and unsaturated lipids.

Transcription and Translation in Prokaryotesīetalain is the pigment responsible for the red color of beetroot.Cholesterol is an essential component of all animal cell membranes and plays an important role in maintaining the membrane structure and physical–chemical properties necessary for correct cell functioning.

Changes in Signal Transduction Pathways.

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