We confirmed the structure stays in the Q I phase with gyroid symmetry by visual inspection and sketching various components of the structure as we do in Fig 3 . However, it is useful to have a quantitative metric to monitor how close our structure is to the ideal gyroid Q I structure. Since we expect the glycerol molecules to be roughly along the minimal surface of the gyroid, we used the average perpendicular distance of the center of mass of the glycerol molecules to the gyroid minimal surface as a quantitative measure of deviation over the simulation time. By observing the snapshots of simulation, we find that the structure is gyroid-like when this distance is below 0.6 nm, where glycerol molecules are aligned along the gyroid minimal surface and the tail ends form two non-intersecting continuous regions. But, once this distance is above 0.8 nm, the structure is no longer gyroid; the two previously nonintersecting tail regions merge into one continuous region and glycerol molecules are no longer along the gyroid minimal surface. As seen from Fig , the distance stays below 0.5 nm over a microsecond at temperature 300 K whereas for temperature 343 K it jumps to over 0.8 nm after 200 ns.