Calculating the Bending Modulus for Multicomponent Lipid Membranes in Different Thermodynamic Phases

[Image: see text] We establish a computational approach to extract the bending modulus, K(C), for lipid membranes from relatively small-scale molecular simulations. Fluctuations in the splay of individual pairs of lipids faithfully inform on K(C) in multicomponent membranes over a large range of rigidities in different thermodynamic phases. Predictions are validated by experiments even where the standard spectral analysis-based methods fail. The local nature of this method potentially allows its extension to calculations of K(C) in protein-laden membranes.