The driving forces of membrane remodeling by non-intrinsically curved proteins

Membranes are dynamically remodeled during numerous processes essential to cells. Among the most well-studied effectors of this remodeling are BAR family proteins, which are small and have a banana-like intrinsic curvature that senses, forms, and stabilizes curved membranes without expending energy as ATP or GTP. Recent experiments in reduced systems have shown, however, that small proteins that feature no such intrinsic curvature can similarly cluster at and dramatically remodel membranes. These proteins have no distinguishing features other than their size and their membrane-binding sites, and the dominant effect that is driving curvature is not well understood. Here, we present a coarse-grained simulation study that captures protein steric and binding effects as well as membrane fluctuations at large scales. We use this model to systematically test for the role that such attributes play in the resulting dynamics and equilibrium structures of remodeling processes that feature this motif.