Simulating liquid-liquid phase separation and lipid transport on the Anton special purpose machine

We present simulation data for a bilayer composed of a ternary mixture of cholesterol, dioloeoyl phosphatidylcholine and dipalmitoyl phosphatidylcholine. The composition is chosen to be in the two-phase region and the temperature in the vicinity of the miscibility transition. Using the Anton special purpose computer to generate continuous trajectories longer the ten microseconds---which admits complete mixing of the lipids---we observe robust liquid-liquid phase coexistence. The time-and ensemble-averaged mean squared displacement (MSD) displays anomalous scaling on timescales less than 50 nsec and normal diffusion on longer timescales. The short-time anomalous scaling is explained by a mode-coupling argument[Flenner et al Phys Rev E 79:011907(2009)]. The per-lipid MSD's suggest that a few lipids remain associated with the liquid ordered domain for the duration of the simulation, suggesting a possible mechanism for anomalous transport on experimentally accessible timescales.