Surface tension and electroporation of lipid bilayers
Name
765450856-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
12.42 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d75ef113bd6c4dadae43f3b7442817db
Author(s)
Cho, Han-Jae Jeremy
Advisor(s)
Evelyn N. Wang.
Date Issued
2011
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Electroporation of lipid bilayers is widely used in DNA transfection, gene therapy, and targeted drug delivery and has potential applications in water desalination and filtration. A better, more thorough molecular understanding is needed, however, before such devices can be effectively used and developed. From aqueous pore formation theory, electroporation behavior is known to be largely dictated by surface energy. We hypothesize that this surface energy can be described by separate head and tail components of the lipid molecules, which can be obtained experimentally. In this thesis, we demonstrated a basic ability to electroporate lipid bilayers as well as verify its electrical behavior. We formed lipid monolayer and bilayer films and studied their wetting properties using water, formamide, and diiodomethane. We determined that the strong interaction between polar liquids (water and formamide) and hydrophilic substrates (mica and glass) can affect the wetting behavior and quality of films. In addition, we verified that the resulting surface energy of lipid tails is mostly nonpolar. The insights of this work offer a first step towards characterizing the surface energies of different lipids and how they relate to the electroporation behavior.
Description
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2011.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-79).
Subjects
Mechanical Engineering.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
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