Figure 1:

The rapid corner first, insertion of a bare 5 nm × 5 nm GNF into a bilayer. (a–f) Simulation renderings of the insertion process as function of time; water is not shown for clarity, phosphorous atoms of DOPC are shown as yellow to highlight boundary, DOPC tails are shown as gray, and CHOL colored green. (g) Distance between the centers-of-mass of the GNF and bilayer, projected along the bilayer normal, shows the rapid insertion at ~8 ns. (h) The value of unity for normalized dot product calculated between the vectors describing the GNF diagonals (blue and black) and the bilayer normal indicates corner first insertion. (i) The angle between the GNF and bilayer normal, where GNF inserts at ~10 degrees from normal; after ~50 ns, the value is close to 0 degrees, closely aligned with the bilayer normal.