Polyunsaturated and saturated phospholipids in mixed bilayers: a study from the molecular scale to the lateral lipid organization.

Polyunsaturated lipids are remarkably flexible molecules, with a great influence on the membrane structure and dynamics, affecting from mechanical properties to domain segregation. In this work, we studied phospholipid mixtures of dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) and diunsaturated phosphatidylcholine lipids (diunsPC) of different lengths, by means of molecular dynamic simulations of a coarse-grained interaction model. These diunsPC:DPPC binary mixtures show nonideal behavior characterized by one mixed phase with composition fluctuations on a length scale of nanometers. Motivated by this observation, we studied comprehensively the characteristics of molecular structure as a function of the compositional gradient. We analyzed orientational order profiles, density distributions, and pair-pair correlation functions between the molecule residues. We observed that, in diunsPC-enriched regions, DPPC tails become expanded and disordered, especially toward the membrane center. On the other hand, in the more condensed DPPC-enriched patches, diunsaturated acyl chains become displaced toward the interface instead of stretching along the membrane normal. From the comparison of the two diunsPC lipids of different tail length, we measured that the presence of a longer terminal saturated segment induces better mixing with DPPC, and most interestingly eliminates the up-down composition correlation measured with the shorter tail-diunsPC. At molecular level, there is a reduced redistribution of densities and changes in the local order as a function of composition. We interpret these results as indicative that the packing incompatibility between polyunsaturated and saturated lipids rules their mixing behavior.