[1] In addition, the size of vesicles dictates their membrane curvature which is an important factor in studying fusion proteins.
Phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylserine, phosphatidylinositol, and sphingomyelin are some of the most common lipids most animal cell membranes.
[4][5] Therefore, the composition and sizes of the unilamellar liposomes must be chosen carefully based on the subject of the study.
Then chloroform is evaporated using a gentle stream of nitrogen (to avoid oxygen contact and oxidation of lipids) at room temperature.
Natural swelling: in this method soluble lipids in chloroform are pipetted on a Teflon ring.
Next the aqueous buffer is added gently over the Teflon ring and lipids are allowed to naturally swell to form GUVs overnight.
the disadvantage of this method is that a large amount of multilamellar vesicles and lipid debris are formed.
[9] A variety of methods exist to encapsulate biological reactants within GUVs by using water-oil interfaces as a scaffold to assemble lipid layers.
This allows the use GUVs as cell-like membrane containers for the in vitro recreation (and investigation) of biological functions.
In biomedical research, unilamellar liposomes are extremely useful to study biological systems and mimicking cell functions.