The nature of phospholipid membranes repulsion at nm-distances

Why hydrophobic membranes repel at small distances? We apply recently developed phenomenological theory of polar liquids to calculate the repulsive pressure between two hydrophilic membranes at nm-distances. We find that the repulsion does show up in the model and the solution to the problem fits the published experimental data well both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, we find that the repulsion is practically independent on temperature, and thus put some extra weight in favor of the so called hydration over entropic hypothesis for the membranes interactions explanation. The calculation is a good “proof of concept” example a continuous water model application to non-trivial interactions on nm-size bodies in water arising from long-range correlations between the water molecules.
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arXiv:0908.0632 [pdf, other]

The nature of phospholipid membranes repulsion at nm-distances

Authors: P. O. Fedichev, L.I. Menshikov