(397c) Effect of Molecular Architecture On the Morphology and Properties of Bio-Nanostructured Soft Materials

Our objective is to design effective controlled-release vehicles for lab-on-chip devices for applications in the areas of bionanotherapeutics, sensing and catalysis.  In this presentation we present our results on the role of molecular architecture on the morphology and mechanical properties of bio-nanostructured soft materials. We focus on four lipid architectures with variations in the head group shape and the hydrocarbon tail length. Each lipid species is composed of a hydrophilic head group and two hydrophobic tails. We characterize the soft material via the thickness, interfacial tension, molecular diffusion, area compression modulus, bending modulus, and total energy of the lipid bilayer.  We demonstrate the equilibrium morphology of these bilayer membranes to be determined by factors such as the average area of the lipid, lipid head group orientation, and lipid tail length (Koufos et al., 2013.) We use a Molecular Dynamics-based mesoscopic simulation technique called Dissipative Particle Dynamics that captures the molecular details of the components through soft-sphere coarse-grained models and reproduces the hydrodynamic behavior of the system over extended time scales. The DPD method is highly effective in resolving the dynamics of complex fluids over extended spatiotemporal scales due to the soft-repulsive interaction forces.