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Materials science

Pulsating vesicles

Nature volume 461, pages 45–47 (2009)Cite this article

During her travels through Wonderland, Alice finds several ways of growing and shrinking in size. A polymeric vesicle plays the same trick in response to pH, in a process that might one day be useful for drug delivery.

Molecules and molecular assemblies that undergo controllable shape changes in response to an external trigger will be crucial to manufacturing nanometre-scale devices. But although stimulus-responsive systems are common in nature, it is not always easy to create synthetic versions, even when using nature for inspiration. This is certainly true of vesicles, a class of cell-mimicking structures that have been investigated intensively for decades. In the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Eisenberg and colleagues1 report a polymeric vesicle for which the structure and properties can be controlled — it 'breathes' in response to pH, becoming twice as big in acid solution as it is in basic solution. This reversible size change is accompanied by a permeability change, so that water molecules diffuse more easily through the membrane wall of the vesicle when the structure is highly swollen.

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Figure 1: A pH-responsive vesicle membrane.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jan C. M. van Hest is in the Department of Organic Chemistry, Institute for Molecules and Materials, Radboud University Nijmegen, Heyendaalseweg 135, Nijmegen 6525 AJ, the Netherlands. j.vanhest@science.ru.nl,

    Jan C. M. van Hest

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  1. Jan C. M. van Hest
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van Hest, J. Pulsating vesicles. Nature 461, 45–47 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/461045a

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