73th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (November 22, 2020 — November 24, 2020)

V0041: Lipid Vesicles in a Hypo-osmotic Environment

Authors
  • Vinit Kumar Malik, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
  • Jie Feng, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/APS.DFD.2020.GFM.V0041

A vesicle is a compartment made from a fatty membrane that separates the inside environment from the outside. A multivesicular vesicle is a large vesicle containing many smaller vesicles, much like a cell which can contain many internal compartment. When the inner compartment of the large vesicle has a higher concentrations of molecules ( for example sugar in our video) than the outside, outside water molecules rush in until the large vesicle bursts releasing some of the small vesicles. Once the membrane tension has been released, the large vesicle reseals. However, as you can see in the video, resealing is not always a clean process. Some vesicles will spontaneously form "hairy " appendages on their surfaces like the second example in the video. Understanding, what conditions produce these tufts of membrane could provide deeper insights into the flexible shape transformations of living cells.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Any reuse must credit the author(s) and provide a link back to this page.