Many interesting phenomena of bio-membranes occur in the range of several tens up to a few hundred nanometers -- budding, protein and lipid sorting, mediated interactions, rafts, etc. On such length scales many lipid-specific details have largely faded away, but pure continuum approaches may not yet be applicable. This is the realm of coarse-grained lipid models. Unfortunately it turns out that once the membrane really curves in space, the presence of bulk solvent becomes the dominant limiting factor in simulations. This is why people have been trying for a very long time now to eliminate the need for incorporating explicit solvent in simulations, but success has only been very recent. In this talk I will describe in some detail an efficient solvent-free simulation model developed in my group, discuss its physical properties, and illustrate its usefulness in a variety of applications, such as domain-induced budding, composition-curvature coupling, and membrane-mediated interactions.
Audio (MP3 File, Podcast Ready)
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