Phospholipid membranes repulsion at nm-distances explained within a continuous water model

Abstract

We apply recently developed phenomenological theory of polar liquids to calculate the repulsive pressure between two hydrophilic membranes at nm-distances. We find that the repulsion does show up in the model and the solution to the problem fits the published experimental data well both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, we find that the repulsion is practically independent on temperature, and thus put some extra weight in favour of the so called hydration over entropic hypothesis for the membranes interactions explanation. The calculation is a good proof of concept example a continuous water model application to non-trivial interactions on -size bodies in water arising from long-range correlations between the water molecules.