The budding of transport vesicles from larger membrane compartments, followed by fusion with another compartment, is a basic mechanism for a variety of cellular processes including endo- and exocytosis. The mprDPD technique implements compartments as composed of locally interacting entities which can autonomously exhibit processes such as budding and fission as a result of changes in local properties e.g. molecular associations or reactions leading to structures preferring a different local curvature of the membrane.
Budding of a small vesicle from a large compartment.
The advantage of such a modelling framework is that mesoscale changes in vesicle structure can arise spontaneously from reactions or molewcular transport to or from the membrane. The budding process itself for example is the result to be calculated from lower-level processes.
The figure illustrates the capability of the mpRDPD-appraoch to model mesoscopic topological changes from local interactions. The budding process was induced by a local increase of curvature.