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Transition From Unilamellar To Bilameller Vesicles Induced By An Amphiphilic Biopolymer, Jae-Ho Lee, Vivek Argarwal, Arijit Bose, Gregory F. Payne, Srinivasa R. Raghavan
Transition From Unilamellar To Bilameller Vesicles Induced By An Amphiphilic Biopolymer, Jae-Ho Lee, Vivek Argarwal, Arijit Bose, Gregory F. Payne, Srinivasa R. Raghavan
Chemical Engineering Faculty Publications
We report some unusual structural transitions upon the addition of an amphiphilic biopolymer to unilamellar surfactant vesicles. The polymer is a hydrophobically modified chitosan and it embeds its hydrophobes in vesicle bilayers. We study vesicle-polymer mixtures using small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) and cryotransmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM). When low amounts of the polymer are added to unilamellar vesicles of ca. 120 nm diameter, the vesicle size decreases by about 50%. Upon further addition of polymer, lamellar peaks are observed in the SANS spectra at high scattering vectors. We show that these spectra correspond to a co-existence of unilamellar and bilamellar vesicles. …