Figure 2.

(a) Schematic representation of the model of a peptide incorporated into the membrane with the raft. The raft area is shaded in pink and outlined by bold lines, the surrounding membrane is shown in white and outlined by thin lines. L designates the shift of the monolayer raft boundaries. The area occupied by fusion peptides is shown in gray. The width of the fusion peptide is 2R_FP. The distance from the center of fusion peptide to the center of coordinates is designated as R. (b) Dependence of the equilibrium energy of the membrane W (expressed as the energy per unit length of the raft boundary) upon the coordinate R of the fusion peptide. The blue curve corresponds to the case of the half-width R_FP equal to 1 nm, the red one—to the case of the half-width R_FP equal to 0.5 nm. The equilibrium thicknesses of the raft monolayer and the monolayer of the surrounding membrane are designated as h_r and h_s, respectively.