National Center for Design of
Biomimetic Nanoconductors

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Structure and Stability of Lipid Rafts

Side, top and bottom snapshots of a simulated system consisting of a domain of sphingomyelin (yellow) and cholesterol (orange) embedded in a large bilayer of di-olyel phosphatidylcholine (gray). For clarity, the water molecules are removed from the pictures. This simulation consisted of about 240,000 atoms. The goal was to understand the structure and stability of lipid rafts. (reference Biophys. Journal 87, 1092-1100 (2004)

The National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors is funded by Grant Number PHS 2 PN2 EY016570B from the National Institutes of Health through the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research and is based at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Partner institutions include Yale University, University of Southern California, University of Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, Sandia National Laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory, Oxford University, Wabash College, University of California, Davis, nanoHUB at Purdue University, and the University of New Mexico.