Conveners
W4-8 Membrane Biophysics and Drug Delivery (DPMB) / Biophysique des membranes et administration de médicaments (DPMB)
- Melanie Campbell (University of Waterloo)
Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative condition marked by the formation and aggregation of amyloid-𝜷 (A𝜷) peptides. It is the most common cause of dementia worldwide, with numbers expected to double each year, reaching 81 million by 2040. There exists, to this day, no cure or effective prevention for the disease; however, there is evidence that a nutritious diet and certain food compounds...
More than 30 million individuals worldwide are living with Alzheimer’s Disease. To further the current understanding on this neurodegenerative disease, we developed a technique to create amyloid peptide clusters in synthetic, brain-like membranes, which mimic the senile plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. I compared the molecular functioning of homotaurine, a peptic...
How diffusivity (e.g., of proteins in the plane of biomembranes) is impacted by obstruction has been explored using Lattice Monte Carlo methods for random and periodic obstacle configurations. However real systems are neither periodic nor totally random. We present a study of transient and steady-state molecular diffusion in two-dimensional ”Fuzzy” systems of immobile obstacles, \textit{i.e.,}...
Cell membranes are complex dynamic structures, and their composition and structure are major determinants of pathology. It is now commonly accepted that the membranes’ physical properties, such as fluidity and thickness, are determining factors for permeability, partitioning of drug molecules, and protein aggregation. Membrane-interacting molecules can in some instances be expected to have a...
Blood banks all around the world store blood for several weeks ensuring the availability of blood for transfusion medicine. Although the storage conditions have been optimized for decades it has become evident that red blood cells (RBC) undergo numerous changes when being stored.
We investigated the effect of storage on the nanoscopic bending rigidity of RBC membranes with a combination of...
Due to their highly tunable physical properties and their biocompatibility, hydrogels-based drug delivery systems have sparked huge interests over the past twenty years. One of the reasons of this interest lies to the ability to encapsulate drug particles inside the porous hydrogel structure. In addition, by adjusting the density of cross-links in the gel matrix, it is possible to modify the...
We use Langevin dynamics (LD) simulations to investigate single file diffusion (SFD) in a dilute solution of flexible linear polymers inside a narrow tube. The transition from single-file diffusion, where the mean-square displacement scales like $\langle x^2 \rangle \sim t^{1/2}$, to normal diffusion with $\langle x^2 \rangle \sim t$, is studied as a function of the system parameters, such as...
