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Lipid multilayers

Domains stack up

Nature Materials volume 11, pages 1005–1006 (2012)Cite this article

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Stacked bilayers can exhibit columnar alignment of phase-separated domains that propagates across hundreds of layers. The serial coupling of functionality that may result from such a long-range arrangement should lead to new applications in photonics and sensing.

In lipid bilayers deposited on solid surfaces, the lipids align in the plane of the supporting surface. Still, they can rotate along their axis and diffuse laterally, thus giving the bilayer in-plane fluidity1. Planar alignment and fluidity are preserved in each bilayer when multiple bilayers are stacked on top of each other on the substrate. Hence, lipid multilamellae exhibit the typical smectic alignment of liquid crystals. Reporting in Nature Materials, Atul Parikh and collaborators show that, in addition to intralayer smectic arrangement, supported stacks of multicomponent lipid bilayers with phase-separated domains can also display interlayer order, where domain alignment propagates across hundreds of bilayers2.

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Figure 1: Interlayer alignment of intralayer domains in stacked lipid multilayers.

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Affiliations

  1. Burkhard Bechinger is at the Université de Strasbourg/CNRS, UMR7177, Institut de Chimie, 1, rue Blaise Pascal, 67070 Strasbourg, France

    Burkhard Bechinger

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  1. Burkhard Bechinger
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Correspondence to Burkhard Bechinger.

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Bechinger, B. Domains stack up. Nature Mater 11, 1005–1006 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3507

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