Protein aggregation in membranes

Recently, progress has been made in understanding further the theory of protein aggregation in membranes induced by membrane-mediated elastic deformation. Aggregation may occur when: (i) there is a mis-match in size of the hydrophobic part of the protein with the membrane thickness which leads to a non-monotonic force between proteins associated with the membrane deformation; (ii) the proteins induce a local change in membrane stiffness which couples to the thermal fluctuations of the membranes and engenders a van der Waals-like long range attraction which decays as r−4; (iii) the proteins act as gap junctions pinching together two membranes which are otherwise repelling one another, which produces logarithmic long range attraction which may, in turn, induce aggregation.