Speaker
Description
Molecular compounds based on boron-dipyrromethene (BODIPY) have been shown to be promising candidates for microscopic, single-molecule scale sensing of environment properties, such as temperature or viscosity [1]. It is also possible to anchor the sensors to a specific type of microscopic environment, e.g. a lipid cell membrane, where the restricted molecular drift results in a measurable estimate of the bulk viscosity [2].
In this work, an existing quantum-chemical model of microviscosity sensitivity is applied to the snapshots of molecular dynamics simulations of a BODIPY sensor anchored in a bilayer lipid membrane. Intensity and timescales of the dynamic changes in expected microviscosity sensitivity are evaluated with the aim to determine how much the bulk drift (spanning 2-12 ns) influences the fluorescence lifetime-based viscosity measurements (0,1-5 ns).
Quantum-chemical computations were performed using resources at the supercomputer “VU HPC” of Vilnius University in the Faculty of Physics location.
[1] K. Maleckaitė et al., Molecules 27, 23 (2022)
[2] D. Narkevičius, master thesis, Vilnius University (2024)
