The natural function of the skin is to protect the body from unwanted influences from the environment. The main barrier of the skin is located in the outermost layer of the skin, the stratum corneum. Since the lipids regions in the stratum corneum form the only continuous structure, substances applied onto the skin always have to pass these regions. For this reason the organization in the lipid...

Highly anisotropic and ordered nanoscale lamellar morphologies can be spontaneously generated over macroscopic areas, without the use of a photomask or any templating agents, via the photoelectrodeposition of Se-Te alloy films. To form such structures, the light source can be a single, linearly polarized light source that need not necessarily be highly coherent. In this work, the variation in t...

The effect of a local anesthetic, lidocaine hydrochloride (LC x HCl), on the bilayer systems of purified egg phosphatidylcholine (EPC), dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) and dioleoylphosphatidylcholine (DOPC) was studied by means of small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), Prodan fluorescence and electrophoretic light scattering. In the liquid crystalline phase of EPC and DOPC bilayers, the con...

Lipid-based liquid crystalline systems are showing potential as stimuli-responsive nanomaterials, and NIR-responsive gold nanoparticles have been demonstrated to provide control of transitions in non-lamellar phases. In this study, we focus on a deeper understanding of the photothermal response of both lamellar and non-lamellar phases, and new systems formed by alternative lipid systems not pre...

Many of the ichthyoses are associated with inherited disorders of lipid metabolism. These disorders have provided unique models to dissect physiologic processes in normal epidermis and the pathophysiology of more common scaling conditions. In most of these disorders, a permeability barrier abnormality "drives" pathophysiology through stimulation of epidermal hyperplasia. Among primary abnormali...

In this communication we report on the self-organising properties of a novel asymmetric bolaphile composed of sugar and steroidal units. The material was found to exhibit unusual phase changes in that it formed a cubic phase upon heating, whereas upon cooling it formed a lamellar phase. This change in property was ascribed to kinetic versus thermodynamic behaviour at the phase transition to the...

Tetramerization of coil-rod-coil ABC triblock copolymers to a tetrabranched molecule induces an unusual 3-D tetragonally perforated layered liquid crystalline phase as an intermediate structure between 1-D lamellar and 2-D hexagonal columnar phases.

Supramolecular complexes of PEI(OA)x show a lamellar structure, and reversible crystal phase transition of the side alkyl chains in the complex can be observed by temperature-variable FT-IR spectroscopy.

The intergranular crack propagation of the lamellar structure β titanium alloys is investigated by using a modified Gurson-type damage model. The representative microstructure of the lamellar alloy, which consists of the soft α phase layer surrounding the hard grain interiors, is generated based on an advanced Voronoi algorithm. Both the normal fracture due to void growth and the shear fracture...

Using pulsed gradient spin-echo NMR, we studied molecular self-diffusion in aligned samples of a hybrid lyotropic lamellar L(alpha) phase. This composite organic-inorganic material was obtained by doping the lamellar phase of the nonionic surfactant Brij-30 with the [PW(12)O(40)](3-) polyoxometalate (POM). Both water and POM self-diffusion display a large anisotropy, as diffusion is severely re...