| Abstrakt: |
Aqueous mixtures of oppositely charged surfactants spontaneously form equilibrium phases of unilamellar vesicles.1 The wide variety of surfactants that display this behavior allows control over vesicle charge, size, and polydispersity. This may be useful for new applications in drug delivery, nanomaterials synthesis, and as tests of theoretical concepts of membrane organization and interactions.A subtle competition between the entropy of mixing and the elastic properties of surfactant and lipid bilayers determines their phase behavior and morphology. The curvature energy per unit area of bilayer, fc, iswhere R1and R2are the principle radii of curvature, K is the curvature modulus, and is the saddle-splay modulus. The spontaneous curvature, l/ro, is nonzero only if there is asymmetry between the two sides of the bilayer. |
