Biophysics of Membrane Fusion and Fission

The book describes the current biophysical understanding of membrane fusion and fission. This includes the basic physics of membrane structure and elasticity, the specific pathways of the intermediate structures of membrane rearrangements and their energies, and the mechanisms by which the specialized proteins induce forces driving fusion and fission reactions. The book is written for graduate students and researchers in the fields of biophysics, biochemistry, biology, and biotechnology and provides the reader with a tutorial like presentation of the physics of lipid membranes necessary for understanding the membrane rearrangements and the analysis of existing phenomenological data on membrane fusion and fission in different systems. The topics are presented from a common viewpoint of required forces, energies and the related tasks for protein machineries.