Collaborator: Dr. Paul Chiarot, SUNY Binghamton, Department of Mechanical Engineering
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Through a very fruitful collaboration with the Chiarot Mechanical Engineering Lab at Binghamton University, our group has successfully created synthetic, asymmetric, and customizable vesicles. The novelty of these vesicles is their asymmetry and their close relevance to biological membranes. The synthetic vesicles are manufactured using high throughput microfluidic technology. Water-in-oil emulsions are formed by flow focusing and passed through a lipid rich oil stream where the lipids assemble on an oil-water interface. The outer leaflet is assembled through another flow focusing step, this time water-in-oil-in-water emulsions are formed, and the second layer of lipids spontaneously assemble on the water-oil interface. Rigorous testing has demonstrated that asymmetry is maintained for up to 30 hours and that intermixing or flip-flopping of the two lipid leaflets is minimal. Recently, our group has successfully constructed asymmetric vesicles with an LPS outer leaflet, which is extremely exciting as they now truly resemble the bacterial OM. Through these asymmetric synthetic vesicles, we can study how molecules such as PQS induce OMV biogenesis, specifically by understanding what factors of LPS affect intercalation of PQS into the outer leaflet.
Lu et al., 2015