Open Access Publication of the Month – Laura M. Schmitt (IBI-2) et al.
12 October 2022
To encourage us all to broaden our horizons, each month the Central Library selects one open access publication from the JuSER publications portal to be featured in the newsletter of Forschungszentrum Jülich.
In this month’s open access publication, Schmitt, Dreissen, Kolasinac, Csiszár, and Merkel (all IBI-2) write about a mechanically driven phase transition.
Fusogenic liposomes are artificially produced lipid particles with a high positive charge, which can be loaded with foreign molecules and fuse very easily with cell membranes. This enables the rapid, gentle introduction of foreign molecules into living cells and thus a wide range of biomedical applications.
Schmitt et al. aspirated fusogenic liposomes using micropipettes and determined the changes in their area. Surprisingly, it was found that fusogenic liposomes are always under high mechanical membrane tension and that their surface area can be easily increased.
The authors explain this by a coexistence of the usual lipid membrane – the lamellar phase – with a three-dimensional lipid phase. Due to the highly different molecular area requirements in the two phases, a mechanical tension drives the thermodynamic equilibrium from the three-dimensional phase towards the usual lipid membrane. Without tension, there would only be the three-dimensional phase. Metaphorically speaking, the three-dimensional phase represents a membrane reservoir that is “tapped” when required, for example in the case of contact with cell membranes.
The open access publication entitled “Membrane tension controls the phase equilibrium in fusogenic liposomes” was published in the journal RSC Advances.
JuSER publications database – Membrane tension controls the phase equilibrium in fusogenic liposomes
Internet – Institute of Biological Information Processing – Mechanobiology (IBI-2)