Table of Contents

1. Membranes: An Introduction

2. Membrane Structure

3. The Composition of Biological Membranes

4. Introduction into Thermodynamics

5. Water

6. Lipid Melting

7. Phase Diagrams

8. Statistical Models for Lipid Melting

9. Lipid-Protein Interactions

10. Diffusion

11. Electrostatics

12. Adsorption, Binding and Insertion of Proteins

13. Elasticity and Curvature

14. Thermodynamics of the Elastic Constants

15. Structural Transitions

16. Relaxation Processes in Membranes

17. Permeability

18. Nerve Pulse Propagation

19. Anesthesia

About the Author

Thomas Heimburg received his Ph.D. in physics and his habilitation in biophysics both from the Physics Department of the University of Göttingen, Germany. He was a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and head of the independent research group "Membrane Biophysics & Thermodynamics". He was appointed associate professor in the Physics Department of the University of Göttingen. Now he is associate professor for biophysics at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen and head of the Membrane Biophysics Group.

His primary research interests are experimental and theoretical thermodynamics and spectroscopy of artificial and biological membranes with a special focus on cooperative phenomena in biomembranes.