Fusion of asymmetric membranes: the emergence of a preferred direction

Abstract

The fusion of lipid membranes progresses through a series of intermediate steps with two significant energy barriers: hemifusion-stalk formation and fusion-pore expansion. The cell’s ability to tune these energy barriers is crucial as they determine the rate of many biological processes involving membrane fusion. However, a mechanism that allows the cell to manipulate both barriers in the same direction remains elusive, since membrane properties that the cell could dynamically tune during its life cycle, such as the lipids’ spontaneous curvatures and membrane tension, have an opposite effect on the two barriers: tension inhibits stalk formation while promoting fusion-pore expansion. In contrast, increasing the total membrane concentration of lipids with negative intrinsic curvatures, such as cholesterol, promotes hemifusion-stalk formation while inhibiting pore expansion, and vice versa for lipids with positive intrinsic curvatures. Therefore, changes in these membrane properties increase one energy barrier at the expense of the other, resulting in a mixed effect on the fusion reaction. A possible mechanism to change both barriers in the same direction is by inducing lipid composition asymmetry, which results in tension and spontaneous curvature differences between the monolayers. To test the feasibility of this mechanism, a continuum elastic model was used to simulate the fusion intermediates and calculate the changes in the energy barriers. The calculations showed that a reasonable lipid composition asymmetry could lead to a 10–20k_BT difference in both energy barriers, depending on the direction from which fusion occurs. We further provide experimental support to the model predictions, demonstrating changes in the time to hemifusion upon asymmetry introduction. These results indicate that biological membranes, which are asymmetric, have a preferred direction for fusion.