Modeling the lipid component of membranes.

During the past several years, there have been a number of advances in the computational and theoretical modeling of lipid bilayer structural and dynamical properties. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have increased in length and time scales by about an order of magnitude. MD simulations continue to be applied to more complex systems, including mixed bilayers and bilayer self-assembly. A critical problem is bridging the gap between the still very small MD simulations and the time and length scales of experimental observations. Several new and promising techniques, which use atomic-level correlation and response functions from simulations as input to coarse-grained modeling, are being pursued.