Determining the pivotal plane of fluid lipid membranes in simulations.

Each leaflet of a curved lipid membrane contains a surface at which the area strain vanishes, the so-called pivotal plane. Its distance z0 from the bilayer's midplane arises in numerous contexts, for instance the connection between monolayer and bilayer moduli, stress-profile moments, or area-difference elasticity theories. Here, we propose two precise methods for determining the location of the pivotal plane in computer simulations, both of which rely on monitoring the lipid imbalance across a curved bilayer. The first method considers the ratio of lipid number between the two leaflets of cylindrical or spherical vesicles; it hence requires lipid flip-flop for equilibration. The second method looks at the leaflet difference across local sections cut out from a buckled membrane; this observable equilibrates even in the absence of flip-flop. We apply our methods to two different coarse-grained lipid models, the generic three-bead solvent-free Cooke model and a ten-bead representation of dimyristoylphosphocholine with the explicit solvent MARTINI model. The Cooke model is amenable to both methods and gives results that agree at the percent level. Using it, we also show that the pivotal plane moves outward as lipid curvature becomes more positive. The MARTINI model can only be analyzed with the buckling method; the obtained value z0 = 0.850(11) nm lies about 0.4 nm inwards of the glycerol backbone and is hence unexpectedly small. We attribute this to limitations of the coarse-grained description, suggesting that the location of the pivotal plane might be a good indicator for how well lipid models capture the microscopic origins of curvature elasticity. Finally, we also show that the pivotal plane position itself moves as the membrane is bent. The leading correction is linear in curvature, dependent on the Poisson ratio, and can matter when analyzing experimental results obtained from highly curved inverse hexagonal phases.