Partitioning of caffeine in lipid bilayers reduces membrane fluidity and increases membrane thickness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Caffeine is a small amphiphilic molecule, which is widely consumed as a stimulant to prevent fatigue, but is also used as a common drug adjuvant in modern medicine. Here, we show that caffeine interacts with unsaturated lipid membranes made of 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (POPC). By combining X-ray diffraction and molecular dynamics simulations, we present evidence that caffeine partitions in lipid membranes and locates at the head group-tail group interface of the bilayers. By attracting water molecules from neighboring lipid molecules, it leads to the formation of "water pockets", i.e., a local increase of water density at this interface. Through this mechanism, caffeine leads to an overall decrease of the gauche defect density in the membranes and an increase of membrane thickness, indicating a loss of membrane fluidity. These non-specific membrane interactions may increase the efficacy of analgesic drugs through changes in the bioavailability and rate of metabolism of these drugs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".