Liposomes not only offer the ability to enhance drug delivery, but can effectively act as vaccine delivery systems and adjuvants. Their flexibility in size, charge, bilayer rigidity and composition allow for targeted antigen delivery via a range of administration routes. In the development of liposomal adjuvants, the type of immune response promoted has been linked to their physico-chemical cha...

We present a simple coarse-grained bead-and-spring model for lipid bilayers. The system has been developed to reproduce the main (gel–liquid) transition of biological membranes on intermediate length scales of a couple of nanometres and is very efficient from a computational point of view. For the solvent environment, two different models are proposed. The first model forces the lipids to form ...

Visualization and quantification of lipid order is an important tool in membrane biophysics and cell biology, but the availability of environmentally sensitive fluorescent membrane probes is limited. Here, we present the characterization of the novel fluorescent dyes PY3304, PY3174 and PY3184, whose fluorescence properties are sensitive to membrane lipid order. In artificial bilayers, the fluor...

Polymersomes are bilayer vesicles, self-assembled from amphiphilic block copolymers. They are versatile nanocapsules with adjustable properties, such as flexibility, permeability, size and functionality. However, so far no methodological approach to control their shape exists. Here we demonstrate a mechanistically fully understood procedure to precisely control polymersome shape via an out-of-e...

The heart is a continually active pulsatile fluid pump. It generates appropriate forces by precisely timed and spaced engagement of its contractile machinery. Largely, it makes its own control signals, the most crucial of which are precisely timed and spaced fluxes of ions across the sarcolemma, achieved by the timely opening and closing of diverse voltage-gated channels (VGC). VGCs have four v...

We have studied friction and dissipation in single and bilayer graphene films grown epitaxially on SiC. The friction on SiC is greatly reduced by a single layer of graphene and reduced by another factor of 2 on bilayer graphene. The friction contrast between single and bilayer graphene arises from a dramatic difference in electron-phonon coupling, which we discovered by means of angle-resolved ...

A mixed bilayer of cholesterol and dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine has been formed on a gold-coated block of quartz by fusion of small unilamellar vesicles. The formation of this bilayer lipid membrane on a conductive surface allowed us to study the influence of the support's surface charge on the structure and hydration of the bilayer lipid membrane. We have employed electrochemical measurement...

Amiodarone is a widely prescribed antiarrhythmic drug used to treat the most prevalent type of arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation (AF). At therapeutic concentrations, amiodarone alters the function of many diverse membrane proteins, which results in complex therapeutic and toxicity profiles. Other antiarrhythmics, such as dronedarone, similarly alter the function of multiple membrane proteins, sug...

introduction: we have recently reported the presence of two potassium currents with 598 and 368 ps conductance in the rough endoplasmic reticulum (rer) membrane. the 598 ps channel was voltage dependent and atp sensitive. however, the 368 ps channel was rarely observed and its identity remained obscure. since cationic channels in intracellular organelles such as mitochondria and rer play import...

Metasurfaces supply a planar approach for flexible wavefront manipulation, thus facilitating the integration and minimization of optical elements, especially in terahertz (THz) range. High efficient THz metadevices are highly pursued at present. Here, we propose bilayer design to improve efficiency metadevice. Two silicon pillar arrays with distinguishing geometries integrated on single substra...