Curvature-Driven Phase-Separation of Spherical Vesicle Membranes: Insights from Single-Bead Lipid Models

Motivated by the role of the collective dynamics of lipids in many biological processes, we explore the morphology and kinetics of phase separation in spherical lipid bilayer vesicles. We use single-bead implicit-solvent coarse-grained models based on anisotropic pair potentials to simulate coarsening dynamics and preferred curvatures. We find for molecular mixtures with different preferred curvatures that several interesting phenomena can arise, such as curvature-induced stalling of coarsening and for more extreme curvature variations even the occurrence of budding events of small vesicles. We report on our findings and related theory describing the kinetics of domain formation, coarsening arrest, and related phenomena as curvature is varied.