Center for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics

KCS 2015

Water hydrogen-bonding network structure and dynamics at phospholipid multibilayer surface: Femtosecond mid-IR pump-probe spectroscopy

One of the main components of the biological membrane is lipid. The lipid molecules spontaneously self-assemble into bilayers in aqueous environment. In fact, water molecules around the polar head groups of lipid molecules at the membrane surface strongly affect on a variety of membrane properties, both structural and functional activities of the membrane. For example, water-lipid interaction strengths are closely related to the membrane fluidity. The membrane fluidity of the gel phase is different from that of the liquid crystal phase, which suggest that the lipid-water interaction at the gel phase is different from that of the liquid crystal phase. Due to the underlying complexity of real biological membranes, we considered a phospholipid multibilayer as a model biological membrane and studied water hydrogen bonding network structure and dynamics at different phases of the phospholipid multibilayer by using femtosecond mid-IR pump-probe measurement method with HDO infrared probe.