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495 Modeling the lipid component of membranes H Larry Scott During the past several years, there have been a number of these data as input for more coarse-grained macroscopic advances in the computational and theoretical modeling of lipid modeling work. Concurrently, new experimental data are bilayer structural and dynamical properties. Molecular available (e.g. [7]) and communication between membrane dynamics (MD) simulations have increased in length and time structure experimentalists and simulators has increased. scales by about an order of magnitude. MD simulations The purpose of this review is to summarize the most continue to be applied to more complex systems, including recent advances in lipid bilayer modeling work and to mixed bilayers and bilayer self-assembly. A critical problem is describe promising new uses of atomistic simulations as bridging the gap between the still very small MD simulations input to efforts to model lipid bilayers over macroscopic and the time and length scales of experimental observations. time and length scales. Several new and promising techniques, which use atomic-level correlation and response functions from simulations as input to Methodological advances coarse-grained modeling, are being pursued. Figure 2 shows atomic structures for three representative lipid molecules used in simulations. Atomic-level simula- Addresses tions require as input expressions for the potential energies Department of Biological, Chemical and Physical Sciences, between all atoms in the system, including those between Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA; bonded pairs of atoms and between nonbonded pairs of e-mail: scotth@iit.edu atoms. Harmonic expressions are generally used to model Current Opinion in Structural Biology 2002, 12:495–5