Abstract
Biological matter like membranes are soft materials. Soft materials have a number of unusual properties that are very different from those of traditional hard materials such as metals, ceramics, semi-conductors, and composites. Lipid membranes are soft because they are basically structured liquids made of molecules with substantial conformational complexity. At the same time they have tremendous durability and toughness over ordinary liquids due to the fact that they owe their existence to the self-assembly principles described in Sect. 3.4. As we shall see throughout the remainder of this book, the softness is a requirement for the various modes of function that membranes engage in. Technological applications of soft-matter systems made of lipids will be described in Chap. 20.
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Mouritsen, O.G., Bagatolli, L.A. (2016). A Matter of Softness. In: LIFE - AS A MATTER OF FAT. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22614-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22614-9_5
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22614-9
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