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The solid phase is commonly referred to as a “gel” phase. All lipids have a characteristic temperature at which they undergo a transition from the gel to liquid phase. In both phases the lipid molecules are constrained to the two dimensional plane of the membrane, but in liquid phase bilayers the molecules diffuse freely within this plane.
The lipid bilayer is the barrier that keeps ions, proteins and other molecules where they are needed and prevents them from diffusing into areas where they should not be. Lipid bilayers are ideally suited to this role, even though they are only a few nanometers in width, [2] because they are impermeable to most water-soluble (hydrophilic ...
Lipid molecules in the HII phase pack inversely to the packing observed in the hexagonal I phase described above. This phase has the polar head groups on the inside and the hydrophobic, hydrocarbon tails on the outside in solution. The packing ratio for this phase is larger than one, [1] which is synonymous with an inverse cone packing.
This phase is caused by the packing behavior of single-tail lipids in a bilayer. The difficulty in filling the volume of the interior of a bilayer, while accommodating the area per head group forced on the molecule by the hydration of the lipid head group, leads to the formation of the micelle.
The major types of liposomes are the multilamellar vesicle (MLV, with several lamellar phase lipid bilayers), the small unilamellar liposome vesicle (SUV, with one lipid bilayer), the large unilamellar vesicle (LUV), and the cochleate vesicle. A less desirable form is multivesicular liposomes in which one vesicle contains one or more smaller ...
Lipid bilayer budding is a commonplace phenomenon in living cells and relates to the transport of metabolites in the form of vesicles. During this process, a lipid bilayer is subject to internal hydrostatic stresses, in combination with strain restrictions along a bilayer surface, this can lead to elongation of areas of the lipid bilayer by ...
Regarding biological membranes, the liquid ordered phase is a liquid crystalline phase of a lipid bilayer, and is of significant biological importance. It occurs in many lipid mixtures combining cholesterol with a phospholipid and/or sphingolipids e.g. sphingomyelin. This phase has been related to lipid rafts that may exist in plasma membranes.
The chemical structure of 1-monoolein, the primary studied lipid building block of a cubosome. It is used to form the bilayer of the membrane. Cubosomes are discrete, sub-micron, nanostructured particles of the bicontinuous cubic liquid crystalline phase. The term "bicontinuous" refers to two distinct hydrophilic regions separated by the ...