(613d) Transport Characteristics and Stability of Artificial Water Channels in Lipid and Biomimetic Membranes

Cell membranes owe their high solute or water permeability to various membrane proteins (MPs) that are an essential component of the cellular machinery for exchanging materials, energy, and information. Many MPs such as channels and pumps possess transport characteristics with high specificity that is unmatched in synthetic systems. For example, MPs can sense and transport small solute or solvent molecules both along and against concentration gradients at a rate of billions of molecules per second. Despite these outstanding properties, it is not possible to employ cellular membranes containing MPs in industrial scale separation processes due to their poor chemical and mechanical stability. Although biomimetic membranes made up of self-assembling block copolymers are emerging as a highly promising alternative, the interactions and transport characteristics of biological or bioinspired artificial channels embedded in block copolymer membranes are not well understood at the molecular scale. In this talk, we will present results from long time-scale all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of a synthetic peptide-appended pillar[5]arene (PAP) channel incorporated in lipid and block-copolymer membranes. Our results suggest that the membrane environment can significantly influence the conformational dynamics of PAP channels and potentially their diffusive as well as transport characteristics.