Premium
The Electrochemistry of Liposomes
Author(s) -
Hernández Víctor Agmo,
Scholz Fritz
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
israel journal of chemistry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.908
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1869-5868
pISSN - 0021-2148
DOI - 10.1560/ijc.48.3-4.169
Subject(s) - chemistry , liposome , chronoamperometry , bilayer , membrane , lipid bilayer , vesicle , nanotechnology , biophysics , kinetics , lipid bilayer fusion , adhesion , electrode , electrochemistry , cyclic voltammetry , materials science , biochemistry , physics , organic chemistry , quantum mechanics , biology
This review aims to summarize the current state of research concerning the interaction of electrodes with liposomes suspended in solutions. Main attention is given to the complex mechanism of adhesion and spreading of liposomes on mercury electrodes. That mechanism can be studied with the help of chronoamperometry, where each adhesion‐spreading event appears as a capacitive current spike. Integration of these spikes produces charge versus time transients that can be modeled and simulated, revealing the details of the multi‐step adhesion‐spreading process. Whereas the number of spikes per time mirrors the macro‐kinetics, the analysis of the time behavior of each spike mirrors the micro‐kinetics of each adhesion‐spreading event. The reviewed studies show that this approach provides a new tool to study the properties of liposome membranes. The adhesion‐spreading of liposomes on mercury electrodes has strong similarities to the process of vesicle fusion, which makes these studies a biomimetic model allowing one to deduce the effects of foreign molecules in bilayer membranes.