Tunable morphology of lipid/chitosan particle assemblies

Abstract

Lipid/chitosan (CS) particle assemblies have recently been developed as new promising carriers for drug delivery applications. The present work reports for the first time the formation of such assemblies by a simple spontaneous adsorption of lipid membranes onto the CS particle surfaces. As shown by dynamic light scattering (DLS) measurements, final non-aggregated assemblies with relatively satisfactory size distributions were obtained by using this process. Furthermore, a particular attention has been paid herein to the effect of the initial morphology of lipid membranes (i.e., vesicular or discoidal) on the resulting characteristics of assemblies. To this end, each one of these membranes was mixed with CS particles, and the obtained assemblies were observed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). According to these observations, the vesicular lipid membranes seem to wrap mostly CS particles. In contrast, lipid discs are not reorganized onto the particle surface but would rather be stacked onto the CS particle.