Nanoscale Curvature of Nanocellulose Paper Promotes High Yield Spontaneous Formation of Giant Vesicles

Abstract

Giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) have proven to be instrumental tools for a variety of biophysical experiments including among others, lipid membrane organization, membrane protein function, cytoskeleton mechanics, membrane division. To date, techniques to obtain adequate yields of vesicles require the application of electric fields or dissolution of molecules during growth and quantitative comparisons of the vesicles produced across these different growth conditions is unclear. In this work, we report quantitative measurements that i) show the nanoscale curvature and hydrophilic surface chemistry of nanocellulose paper promotes the highest yields of GUVs when compared to the other most commonly used techniques and ii) lead to the development of a thermodynamic model that unifies our observations and provides mechanistic insight into the growth process. The results from this work show the exciting potential of nanocellulose paper as a simple and scalable platform to manufacture large quantities of GUVs for biophysical interrogation as well as to open avenues in drug delivery and synthetic cells.