Researchers in the Department of Bionanoscience at the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience have published a method to produce controllably small fatty bubbles, called liposomes. These will form the envelopes for future artificial cells.
Liposomes are microscopic fatty bubbles filled with a watery solution. Making them used to be a cumbersome process, especially to make them clean and free of solvents. Researchers from the Cees Dekker Lab at the Faculty of Applied Sciences published a new method in Nature Communications to make controllable liposomes using a unique fluidic chip. The size of the bubbles varies between 5-20 micron in diameter.
The forming of liposomes takes place on the fluidic chip where three flows converge and the process is much akin to blowing bubbles. Firstly there is the flow of the watery interior of the bubble. Along two sides, this flow is joined by a second one containing the fatty molecules solved in alcohol (octanol). A third stream, perpendicular to the other two, pinches off the flow, making a bubble.
Over a short time span of only minutes, the solvent spontaneously retracts from the lipid envelope, leaving a perfect sphere-shaped liposome behind. Octanol, in particular, turned out to behave very handsomely in this aspect. It detaches spontaneously from the liposomes without damaging them in only a couple of minutes. Other solvents took longer or did not fully separate.
Researchers Siddharth Despande, Yaron Caspi and Anna E.C. Meijering wrote that octanol-assisted liposome assembly (OLA) may be used in pharmaceutical sciences (for drug or gene delivery) or for creating the cell membranes of synthetic cells. Last year, bionano Professor Cees Dekker received an ERC grant worth 2.5 million euros for the development of synthetic cell division.
–> Siddharth Despande, Yaron Caspi, Anna E.C. Meijering & Cees Dekker, Octanol-assisted liposome assembly on chip, Nature Communications, January 22, 2016.
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