Calculating the bending modulus for multicomponent lipid membranes in different thermodynamic phases

We establish a computational approach to extract the bending modulus, K_C, for lipid membranes from relatively small-scale molecular simulations. Fluctuations in the splay of individual pairs of lipids faithfully inform on K_C in multicomponent membranes over a large range of rigidities in different thermodynamic phases. Predictions are validated by experiments even where the standard spectral analysis-based methods fail. The local nature of this method potentially allows its extension to calculations of K_C in protein-laden membranes.