In many forms of cancer, membrane properties have been shown to influence disease properties including drug tolerance, signaling transduction, and immune evasion. In leukemic cells specifically, changes in lipid fractions, lipid saturation, and membrane asymmetry have been shown experimentally. Previous molecular dynamics studies on symmetrical murine leukemic membranes have demonstrated a loss of order and density as a result of changes in lipid fractions and saturation. In our model, we aimed to use a multiscale approach expanded to account for membrane asymmetry to identify membrane characteristics of human acute myeloid leukemia (AML) on a larger scale and compare them to healthy human neutrophils. Our method starts with a coarse grained simulation of asymmetrical membranes composed of characteristic lipids for the cancerous and healthy cells. This coarse grained simulation will be used to identify ordered and disordered domains in the membrane systems, which will then be simulated separately in an all-atom approach. By investigating how membrane dynamics change for AML cells with a detailed approach, we are aiming to better understand how these changes influence cell signaling and disease progression while also building a framework to study membrane-protein interactions through molecular dynamics.
Roetering et al. (Sun,) studied this question.