Laboratoire Léon Brillouin
UMR12 CEA-CNRS, Bât. 563 CEA Saclay
91191 Gif sur Yvette Cedex, France
+33-169085241 llb-sec@cea.fr
G. C. Fadda, D. Lairez, Z. Guennouni and A. Koutsioubas
We address the problem of antimicrobial peptides that create pores in lipid bilayers, focusing on voltage-temperature dependence of pore opening. Two novel experiments (voltage clamp with alamethicin as an emblematic representative of these peptides and neutron reflectivity of lipid monolayer at solidwater interface under electric field) serve to revise the only current theoretical model. We introduce a general contribution of peptide adsorption and electric field as being responsible for an unbalanced tension of the two bilayer leaflets and we claim that the main entropy cost of one pore opening is due to the corresponding excluded area for lipid translation.