Membrane fusion is a ubiquitous process in eukaryotic cells. When two membranes fuse, lipid must undergo molecular rearrangements at the point of merging. To understand how lipid structure transitions occur, scientists studied the phase transition of lipid between the lamellar (L(alpha)) phase and the inverted hexagonal (H(II)) phase, based on the idea that lipid must undergo a similar rearrang...

Determination of the mechanisms by which cationic liposomes adhere to and fuse with biological membranes is important to understanding how these lipid vesicles mediate cellular transfection. To determine what role the lipid composition of "target" membranes might have in promoting fusion with cationic liposomes, we have examined the ability of large unilamellar vesicles composed of 1,2-dioleoyl...

Several investigators have shown that CpG-DNA has outstanding effects as a Th1-responsive adjuvant and that its potent adjuvant effects are enhanced by encapsulation with a liposome of proper composition. In this study, we showed that encapsulation with phosphatidyl-Β-oleoyl-γ-palmitoyl ethanolamine (DOPE): cholesterol hemisuccinate (CHEMS) complex enhances the immunostimulatory activity of CpG...

MARIJUANA'S BILL OF HEALTH While the War on Drugs is fought out on the high seas and in the coastal swamps and in the big cities, another war against drugs goes forward in the government-subsidized laboratories where countless scientists have labored for years to discover whether marijuana damages the brain or some other part of the human body. The number of these studies, experiments and proje...

Spider major ampullate silk is a high-performance biomaterial that has received much attention. However, most studies ignore plasticity in silk properties. A better understanding of silk plasticity could clarify the relative importance of chemical composition versus processing of silk dope for silk properties. It could also provide insight into how control of silk properties relates to spider e...

BACKGROUND Cationic nanoemulsions have been recently considered as potential delivery systems for nucleic acids. This study reports the influence of phospholipids on the properties of cationic nanoemulsions/DNA plasmid complexes. METHODS Nanoemulsions composed of medium-chain triglycerides, stearylamine, egg lecithin or isolated phospholipids, ie, DSPC, DOPC, DSPE, or DOPE, glycerol, and wate...

LNTs are unique 3D structures made only of safe and abundant biomaterials by self-assembly. The current bottleneck for developing applications using LNTs is the lack of an easy technique to pattern them on substrates. We report a method to free-draw single lipid nanotube (LNT) patterns in any shape on surfaces with 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphoethanolamine (DOPE) that takes an inverted hexa...

BACKGROUND The unpredictable side effects of a majority currently used drugs are the substantial issue, in which patients and physicians are forced to deal with. Augmenting the therapeutic efficacy of drugs may prove more fruitful than searching for the new ones. Since recent studies show that new cationic derivatives of polyisoprenoid alcohols (APrens) might exhibit augmenting properties, we i...

Polyanionic DNA interacts with cationic amphiphiles to form electrostatic complexes exhibiting rich self-assembled structures. This type of complex has been considered as a nonviral carrier in gene therapy and as a template for nanostructure construction. Here we report a thermally-induced phase transition of the complexes of DNA with the mixtures of a cationic surfactant, dodecyltrimethyl brom...