Figure 5.

(A) Distributions of the distances of C1A-C9E atoms (red) and C1A-C19E atoms (blue) in the Dol tail in the DOPC bilayers; C1A for the first carbon of Dol, C9E the carbon at the end of 9th isoprenyl unit, and C19E the carbon at the end of 19th isoprenyl unit. The distributions are the averages of the three independent replicates, and the standard errors are also shown as the error bars. (B) Distributions of the XY locations of C9E (red) and C19E (blue). In this plot, C1A is always positioned at X = Y = 0, and the long-branch of the oligosaccharide (i.e., the 1C1-14C1 vector) is aligned along the positive X axis, where 1C1 is the C1 carbon of the first GlcNAc residue and 14C1 the C1 carbon of the last G1 Glc residue. The corresponding solid lines are polar histograms that express the angular preference, or lack thereof. If there is no angular preference, the lines should form a circle centered at the origin; the lines in (B) are close enough to be circular to claim no strong angular preference. Specifically, the plane was divided into twelve 30° sectors centered at the origin, and the solid lines connect the points located on the bisector of each sector at a distance equal to the cube root of the sum of the distances from the origin to each dot in that sector. The resulting polar graphs were scaled so that the shapes delineated by the solid lines fill the plot area but do not exceed it. This particular visualization was chosen because 1), a measure for the angular preference should not only take the number of points into account, but also their distance, as points close to the origin do not express a strong angular preference, and 2), for a sufficiently large number of bins and a sufficiently smooth distribution, the centroid of the shape delineated by the solid lines approaches the centroid of the cloud of dots, except for an arbitrary scaling factor. To see this figure in color, go online.