Tension Independence of Lipid Diffusion and Membrane Viscosity

The diffusion of biomolecules at lipid membranes is governed by the viscosity of the underlying two-dimensionally fluid lipid bilayer. For common three-dimensional fluids, viscosity can be modulated by hydrostatic pressure, and pressure-viscosity data have been measured for decades. Remarkably, the two-dimensional analogue of this relationship, the dependence of molecular mobility on tension, has to the best of our knowledge never been measured for lipid bilayers, limiting our understanding of cellular mechanotransduction as well as the fundamental fluid mechanics of membranes. Here we report both molecular-scale and mesoscopic measures of fluidity in giant lipid vesicles as a function of mechanical tension applied using micropipette aspiration. Both molecular-scale data, from fluorescence recovery after photobleaching, and micron-scale data, from tracking the diffusion of phase-separated domains, show a surprisingly weak dependence of viscosity on tension, in contrast to predictions of recent molecular dynamics simulations, highlighting fundamental gaps in our understanding of membrane fluidity.