Abstract
A pre-requisite for life is the formation of membranes. Those membranes need to be stable under a wide range of conditions, but still need to be able to organize into different supramolecular structures to allow them to respond to changes in the environment. One of the challenges the membranes need to face is to deal with all the changes (e.g. size/ shape/ aggregation forms) that are required for the reproduction of cell like systems.Previously [1] we suggested a mechanism of the reproduction of lipid vesicles upon fatty acid addition. One important feature for this mechanism is the relative rate of two processes: The insertion of material into the outer leaflet on the one hand and the equilibration of the material concentration gradient across both leaflets on the other hand. Based on a combination of experiments and molecular dynamic simulations we proposed a mechanism of “vesicle replication by growth and division” with the interesting property that the contents of the vesicles do not leak out during this process.Here we provide additional support for this mechanism based on density gradient separation of vesicles and on experiments with different types of preformed seed vesicles. In addition these results indicate that the alternative mechanism of “de novo” formation as proposed for fatty acid seed vesicles [2] is highly unlikely for the reproduction of lipid containing vesicles.[1] Markvoort et al. Biophys. J.(2010), 99, 1520-1528[2] Chen et al. Biophys. J.(2004), 87, 988-998
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