Rapid and Efficient Formation of Reverse Vesicle on Carbon Fibers

Abstract

Reverse vesicles are the counterparts of normal vesicles which are the aggregations of molecular bilayers with hydrophilic parts inside and hydrophobic parts outside. As their potential applications in many fields, they have attracted much attention of scientists. In this paper, we demonstrated a novel method to prepare reverse vesicles by through egg phosphatidylcholine (EggPC) membrane and microemulsion solution. Reverse vesicles of EggPC can be constructed quickly on carbon fibers. The formation of vesicles can be easily observed in situ under achromatic objective lens by an inverted optical microscope. It is very convenient to characterize the formation of reverse vesicles. We investigated the influences of curvature, adsorption effect, and hydrogen bond interaction on the formation of reverse vesicles and presented the mechanism.