Membrane heterogeneity alters our interpretation of effective energy barriers to transport
arxiv(2024)
摘要
Major efforts in recent years have been directed towards understanding
molecular transport in polymeric membranes. Transition-state theory is an
increasingly common approach to explore mechanisms of transmembrane permeation
with molecular details, but most applications treat all free energy barriers to
transport as equal. This assumption neglects the inherent structural and
chemical heterogeneity in polymeric membranes. In this work, we expand the
transition-state theory framework to include distributions of membrane free
energy barriers. We show that the highest free energy barriers along the most
permeable paths, rather than typical paths, provide the largest contributions
to the experimentally-observed effective free energy barrier. We show that even
moderate, random heterogeneity in molecular barriers will significantly impact
how we interpret the mechanisms of transport through membranes. Naive
interpretations of experimentally measured barriers can lead to incorrect
assumptions about the underlying mechanisms governing transport and miss the
mechanisms most relevant to the overall permeability.
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