Effects of Cholesterol on the Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Passive Transport of Water through Lipid Membranes.

While it has long been known that cholesterol reduces the permeability of biological membranes to water, the exact mechanism by which cholesterol influences transmembrane permeation is still unclear. The thermodynamic and kinetic contributions to the transport of water across mixed DPPC/cholesterol bilayers of different composition are thus examined by molecular dynamics simulations. Our analyses show that cholesterol decreases transmembrane permeability to water mainly by altering the thermodynamics of water transport. In particular, the free-energy barrier to permeation is magnified in the dense bilayer interior and the partitioning of water is significantly lowered. The changes are observed to correlate quantitatively well with the cholesterol-dependent density and thickness of the bilayers. In contrast, diffusion coefficients are relatively insensitive to cholesterol concentration, except in the sparsely populated center of the bilayer. Diffusion of water in cholesterol-containing bilayers appears to be related to changes in the free area in the middle of the bilayer and to the solute cross-sectional area in the denser hydrophobic regions. Overall, cholesterol is found to have an inhibitory effect on the permeation of water at all concentrations investigated, although bilayers containing cholesterol concentrations up to 20 mol % display a more dramatic dependence on cholesterol content than at higher concentrations. Our results show that it is possible to quantitatively reproduce the relative effects of cholesterol on lipid bilayer permeability from molecular dynamics simulations.