Rotational mobility in spherical membranes: the interplay between Saffman–Delbrück length and inclusion size

The mobility of particles in fluid membranes is a fundamental aspect of many biological and physical processes. In a 1975 paper (Saffman PG, Delbrück M. 1975 Brownian Motion in Biological Membranes. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 72 , 3111–3113. (doi: 10.1073/pnas.72.8.3111 )), Saffman and Delbrück demonstrated how the presence of external Stokesian solvents is crucial in regularizing the apparently singular flow within an infinite flat membrane. In the present paper, we extend this classical work and compute the rotational mobility of a rigid finite-sized particle located inside a spherical membrane embedded in Stokesian solvents. Treating the particle as a spherical cap, we solve for the flow semi-analytically as a function of the Saffman–Delbrück (SD) length (ratio of membrane to solvent viscosity) and the solid angle formed by the particle. We study the dependence of the mobility and flow on inclusion size and SD length, recovering the flat-space mobility as a special case. Our results will be applicable to a range of biological problems including rotational Brownian motion, the dynamics of lipid rafts, and the motion of aquaporin channels in response to water flow. Our method will provide a novel way of measuring a membrane’s viscosity from the rotational diffusion of large inclusions, for which the commonly used planar Saffman–Delbrück theory does not apply.