Spontaneous and Driven Growth of Multicellular Lipid Compartments to Millimeter Size from Porous Polymer Structures**

Abstract

AbstractThis report describes a method to obtain multicellular shaped compartments made by lipids growing from a sponge‐like porous structure. Each compartment is several tens of micrometers in diameter and separated by membranes comprised of phospholipid and amphipathic molecules. The multi‐compartment structure spontaneously grew to a millimeter scale, driven by an ionic concentration difference between the interior and exterior environments of the sponge. These compartments can also easily incorporate hydrophilic species as a well as smaller materials such as liposomes. Additionally, we showed that mechanical squeezing of the sponge was also effective in producing multicellular bodies. These simple methods to obtain large‐scale multicellular compartment of lipid membrane will help future designs and trials of chemical communications on artificial cells.