Sugar does not affect the bending and tilt moduli of simple lipid bilayers

The diffuse X-ray scattering method has been applied to samples composed of SOPC, DOPC, DMPC, and POPC with added sugar, either sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose, or trehalose. Several sugar concentrations in the range 200-500 mM were investigated for each of the lipid/sugar samples. We observed no systematic change in the bending modulus KC or in the tilt modulus Kθ with increasing sugar concentration. The average values of both these moduli were the same as those of the respective pure lipid controls within statistical uncertainty of 2%. These results are inconsistent with previous reports of sugar concentration dependent values of KC.