Cheap portable electroformed giant unilamellar vesicles preparation kit

Abstract

The membrane of a cell separates the internal and external media of the cell and contributes to a variety of important processes, including gradient maintenance and signal transduction. Synthetic lipid-made vesicles are commonly utilized as cell membrane model systems. These could be liposomes or giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) in most cases. Liposomes are typically less than 0.5 microns in size, limiting their use for most microscopy experiments. GUVs are a form of liposomes that ranges in size from 5 to 200 microns and are ideal for examining complex phase behaviors of biomembranes using the classical optical setting. This study details the step-by-step development of a portable, light and low-cost kit for generating GUVs by electroformation. Our kit contains an in-built electronic circuitry, and the GUV generation setup, consisting of 3 ITO-coated glasses with heating electrode connections. Approximately 600 µl of GUVs can be produced in one experiment, while the amount could be increased by changing the dimensions of the GUV generation setup. Finally, the originality of the study comes from the fact that many users from different fields unfamiliar with electronics can use our home-built cost-effective approach instead of their expensive commercial counterparts.

Keywords:

• Giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs)
• preparation kit
• biomembranes
• electroformation
• indium tin oxide (ITO)
• function generator
• oscilloscope

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Dr Hamed Ghorpanpour, Dr Reza Didarian, Vahit Guzel and Yasin Öztürk for useful discussions, Zahra Zendeh for helping out with some experiments, and Prof. Sinan Kıvrak and Dr. Sıtkı Kocaoğlu for technical discussions on the components of the set-up.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.