Abstract

The bending elasticity modulus of lipid membranes is obtained by applying for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a novel experimental technique based on digital holographic microscopy. The fluctuations of the radius with time were extracted by tracking and measuring the optical thickness at the vesicle poles. The temporal autocorrelation function of the vesicle diameter computed for each of the studied vesicles was then fitted with the theoretical expression to deduce the membrane’s tension and bending constant. For the bending elasticity modulus of SOPC bilayers, the value of $(0.93\pm 0.03)\times {10}^{-12}$ erg was obtained. This result is in accordance with values previously obtained by means of other conventional methods for the same type of lipid membrane in the presence of sugar molecules in aqueous medium. The obtained results encourage the future development of the digital holographic microscopy as a technique suitable for the measurement of the bending elasticity of lipid membranes.

© 2016 Optical Society of America

Measurement of membrane rigidity on trapped unilamellar phospholipid vesicles by using differential confocal microscopy

Tze-Hsuan Liu, Jian-Long Xiao, Chau-Hwang Lee, and Jiunn-Yuan Lin
Appl. Opt. 50(19) 3311-3315 (2011)

Optical stretching of giant unilamellar vesicles with an integrated dual-beam optical trap

Mehmet E. Solmaz, Roshni Biswas, Shalene Sankhagowit, James R. Thompson, Camilo A. Mejia, Noah Malmstadt, and Michelle L. Povinelli
Biomed. Opt. Express 3(10) 2419-2427 (2012)

Swept source digital holographic phase microscopy

Shichao Chen, Junghyun Ryu, Kiho Lee, and Yizheng Zhu
Opt. Lett. 41(4) 665-668 (2016)

Fully automated digital holographic processing for monitoring the dynamics of a vesicle suspension under shear flow

Christophe Minetti, Thomas Podgorski, Gwennou Coupier, and Frank Dubois
Biomed. Opt. Express 5(5) 1554-1568 (2014)

Transmission and total internal reflection integrated digital holographic microscopy

Jiwei Zhang, Chaojie Ma, Siqing Dai, Jianglei Di, Ying Li, Teli Xi, and Jianlin Zhao
Opt. Lett. 41(16) 3844-3847 (2016)