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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1993 Dec 1;90(23):11341–11345. doi: 10.1073/pnas.90.23.11341

Elastic free energy of anisotropic helical ribbons as metastable intermediates in the crystallization of cholesterol.

D S Chung 1, G B Benedek 1, F M Konikoff 1, J M Donovan 1
PMCID: PMC47978  PMID: 8248250

Abstract

We report measurements of the geometrical structure and temporal evolution of metastable helical intermediates in the pathway for cholesterol crystallization in native and model biles. We find that the lecithin component in the bile can dramatically affect the kinetics along this pathway. We also present a theoretical description of these helical intermediates using an elastic free energy appropriate for anisotropic bilayers of tilted chiral amphiphiles, which provides a quantitative description of the observed helical ribbon geometry and insight into the relative free energies of the observed metastable intermediates.

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Selected References

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