Моделирование процесса порообразования при электрическом пробое бислойных липидных мембран

Abstract

Targeted drug delivery is one of the most important areas in pharmacology. The drug can be placed in a liposomal shell and destroyed it in a specific location in the body using electroporation. In many experiments on the study of electroporation, the bilayer lipid membrane BLM (black film) is used as a model for the action of an electric field. The characteristic pore size during electroporation is several nanometers, which corresponds to the membrane thickness. These pores can be visualized using cryoelectron microscopy or atomic force microscopy. However, we cannot observe with the help of these methods the dynamics of pores: changes in their number in the membrane and changes in their size over time. We suggest using 100-500 nm color film until it has turned into a black BLM film as the BLM model. Metastable pore-defects about 6 µm in size were registered in the color film, which were observed with a light microscope (video is attached, pore-defects appear at the very end of the recording). The temporal characteristics of the registered pore-defects were considered: the lifetime of pores before membrane rupture, the rate of increase in the number of pores in the membrane. The results obtained show that a thick colored film can be used as a BLM model for studying the process of pore formation during electroporation.