Speaker
Dr
Volker Urban
(Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Description
The biophysics of lipid bilayer membrane systems is one of the essential prerequisites that enable the complex functions of living systems. The roles provided by membranes include compartmentalization and sub-cellular structures, the possibility for maintaining gradients of concentration or chemical potential, and the involvement in signal transduction, to name a few. Lipid bilayer systems build on the self-assembly properties of lipid molecules, but in nature they also exhibit higher forms of organization and quasi-periodic structures such as those that are observable in the light-harvesting apparatus of cyanobacteria. Moreover, quasi-elastic scattering or diffraction techniques allow us to explore the motions and nano-scale mechanical properties of these soft materials and their relation to the response of organisms to changes in environmental parameters. This presentation will give examples of exploring these facets with neutron diffraction or scattering techniques, and it will include a discussion of recent technical developments and ongoing projects in small- and wide-angle scattering and grazing incidence techniques at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Primary author
Dr
Volker Urban
(Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
