Origin of lipid tilt in flat monolayers and bilayers.

Abstract

This paper continues the series of our works devoted to the liquid-gel phase transition in lipid membranes. Previously we described a variation of area per lipid, membrane thickness, and diffusion coefficient at the temperature-driven liquid-gel phase transition in bilayers. Here we expand the application of our analytic model approach to include a description of the lipid tilt and also extend the investigation to include Langmuir and self-assembled monolayers. The theory describes tilt formation at the temperature-driven liquid-gel phase transition in bilayers and the pressure-driven phase transition in Langmuir monolayers. Neither uniform tilt nor liquid-gel phase transition is found in self-assembled monolayers chemically bonded to the substrate.