Corrections to the Electrical Capacitance of Deformed Lipid Membrane

Abstract

The thickness of the lipid membrane is its substantial characteristics. Usually, the thickness of a lipid bilayer is experimentally determined by measuring its electrical capacitance in the approximation of a plane-parallel capacitor. However, membranes formed from a mixture of lipids or containing membrane-deforming inclusions are laterally inhomogeneous, and for them the plane-parallel capacitor approximation generally does not hold. In this work, corrections to the electrical capacitance resulting from deformation of the lipid membrane were numerically calculated. It is shown that the model of a planar capacitor (or their parallel connections), in the general case, does not quantitatively describe these corrections due to the non-zero tangential component of the electric field strength. It is shown that the relative deviation of corrections to the electrical capacitance calculated in various simplified models from the exact solution can reach 50%.