HECBiosim's http://www.hecbiosim.ac.uk/ provision of access to the national supercomputing service, ARCHER https://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/facilities/archer enabled Professor Syma Khalid (of University of Southampton) and her group https://symakhalidresearchgroup.wordpress.com/ to simulate the life-size outer membrane vesicles of Gram-negative bacteria interacting with a (model) mammalian membrane (provided by Prof. Mark Sansom of the University of Oxford).
The OMV/mammalian membrane system comprises ~ 9 million particles; the molecular dynamics simulations were run using the software GROMACS http://www.gromacs.org/ with the MARTINI coarse-grained force-field. Occupying 7 nodes (i.e. 168 processors) on ARCHER produced ~40 nanoseconds of 'real-time' simulation per day.
The simulations show the OMV trying to penetrate the (model) mammalian membrane and although it is not known whether they will, they are clearly interacting with, and deforming, the membrane.
