Adhesive Nanoparticles as Local Probes of Membrane Curvature.

Biological and biomimetic membranes display complex shapes with nonuniform curvature. Because the interaction of adhesive nanoparticles with such membranes depends on the local membrane curvature, different segments of the same membrane can differ in their engulfment behavior. For a single vesicle in contact with many nanoparticles, we predict ten distinct engulfment patterns as well as morphological transitions between these patterns, which are directly accessible to experiment.