National Center for Design of
Biomimetic Nanoconductors

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H. Larry Scott

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H. Larry Scott is currently Professor in the Department of Biological, Chemical and Physical Sciences at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Research

He and Dr. Jakobsson are currently collaborating on simulation of cholesterol and ion channels in membranes where the objectives are to carry out simulations of bilayers of lipids plus cholesterol at a number of lipid:cholesterol ratios (Chiu et al., 2002), and simulations of large bilayers of sphingomyelin (Chiu et al., 2003) and to include cholesterol in SGML membrane simulations (Khelashvili et al., 2004). The groups of Drs Scott and Jakobsson have collaborated on large scale simulations of lipid bilayers of mixed composition, and have found that cholesterol acts to accelerate the formation of localized ordered domains in these systems. (Pandit et al., 2004; ) Dr. Scott has developed a coarse-grained statistical mechanical model for lipid-cholesterol mixtures that is capable of describing the lateral organization of these membranes at biological scales of length and time (Khelashvili et al., 2005).

Scott’s work in using atomically detailed molecular dynamics simulations to provide the numerical foundation for statistical mechanics descriptions of domain formation in membranes is unique. This work is essential to understanding the detailed bases of lipid structure in and around nanopores, because the time course of domain formation is too slow, and happens on too large a distance scale, to be computable by molecular dynamics alone. Yet the information on detailed interactions obtainable from molecular dynamics is essential to include in the description, in order to be able to relate the chemical composition of a membrane to the structures that it forms.

Related Publications

Chiu, S.-W., Jakobsson, E., Mashl, R. J., and Scott, H. L. ”Cholesterol - induced modifications in lipid bilayers”: A simulation study. Biophys. J., 83(2002):18421853.

S. W. Chiu, E. Jakobsson, S. Vasudevan, R. J. Mashl, and H. L. Scott. “Structure of Sphingomyelin Bilayers: a Simulation Study”. Biophys J. 85, (2003) 3624-3635.

G. Khelashvili and H. L. Scott, ”Combined Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulation of hydrated 18:0 sphingomyelin - cholesterol lipid bilayers” J. Chem. Phys 120 (2004) 9841-9847.

G. Khelashvili, S. Pandit, and H. L. Scott, “Self-consistent Mean Field Model Based on Molecular Dynamics: Application to Lipid-cholesterol Bilayers.” J. Chem. Phys. (2005), July 15 issue.

S. Pandit, E. Jakobsson, S. Vasudevan, S.. W. Chiu, R. J. Mashl, and H. L. Scott, “Sphingomyelin- cholesterol Domains in Phospholipid Membranes: Atomistic Simulation”, Biophys J. 87 (2004), 1092-1100.

S. Pandit, E. Jakobsson, and H. L. Scott, “Simulation of the Early Stages of Nano-Domain Formation in Mixed Bilayers of Sphingomyelin, Cholesterol, and Dioleylphosphatidylcholine” Biophys J., 87 (2004), 3312-3322.

Related Links

Illinois Institute of Technology

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.