Optimizing the crowding strategy: sugar-based ionic micelles in the dilute-to-condensed regime.

In the present study, we explore the effect of concentration on micelles made by different gangliosides, which are ionic biological glycolipids bearing multisugar headgroups with huge steric hindrance. Moreover, strong preferential interactions exist among like-conformer headgroups that can keep the ganglioside micelles in a trapped configuration. We extend the well-known ionic-amphiphiles paradigm, where local condensation and micelle crowding are matched by forming larger aggregates at increasing concentration. In fact, we force the balance between interparticle and intraparticle interactions while allowing for like conformers to modulate rebalancing. In the vast experimental framework, obtained by Small Angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) experiments, a theoretical model, accounting for a collective conformational transition of the bulky headgroups, is developed and successfully tested. It allows us to shed some light on the nature and coupling of the intermolecular forces involved in the interactions among glycolipid micelles. Energy minimization leads to complex behavior of the aggregation number on increasing concentration, fully consistent with the experimental landscape. From a biological perspective, this result could be reflected in the properties of ganglioside-enriched rafts on cell membranes, with a nonlinear structural response to approaching bodies such as charged proteins.