Main accomplishers: Ou-Yang Zhong-can, Xie Yu-zhang, Liu Ji-xing, Zheng Wei-mou, Hu Jian-guo
“The Theoretical Study on Shapes of Biomembrane Vesicles with Liquid Crystal Model” has been awarded as Second Rank Prize of National Natural Sciences, China, 1999. In the investigation the general shape equation of vesicle of lipid bilayer has been derived. Based on the equation the torus solution in which the ratio between two radii of two generating circles must equal square root of 2 has been found in the world and soon confirmed experimentally by several international laboratories that then opens a new field of study of vesicles with high genera in topology. In the project a theory of chiral lipid bilayer was presented for describing the helical structures of chiral biomembranes observed by several laboratories since 1984. The study of the solution for the general shape equation found a solution of rotationally symmetric and biconcave shape, exactly the same as the famous shape of red blood cells, resolving a long-standing puzzle in the existence of rotationally symmetric vesicle solutions in literature.
