Abstract
An investigation of the processes of growth and division of oleic acid/oleate and POPC/oleic acid/oleate vesicles (POPC stands for 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine) is presented. Preliminarily, kinetic turbidimetric studies show that the very slow process of spontaneous formation of vesicles from oleate micelles is dramatically accelerated by the presence of a small amount of preformed POPC vesicles ([POPC]/[oleic acid + oleate] = 1:25), suggesting in the latter case a quite different process of vesicle formation. The changes in the size distribution of preformed vesicles is then studied by cryotransmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM) and by using an entrapped protein, ferritin, which, due to its dense iron core, can be detected by cryo-TEM. In this way, the size distributions of “filled” (ferritin-containing) and “empty” vesicles were determined. Addition of oleate to preformed POPC vesicles resulted in a shift of the size distribution of the ferritin-containing vesicles toward larger ...
Published Version
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