A solute, excluded from or confined within a spatial “compartment” embedded in an aqueous continuum, creates a gradient in the chemical activity of water. This in turn prompts a directed flow of water pushing it into the solute-laden compartment and out of thesolute-starved one. Serving as a non-specific entropic force, this osmotic stress acts on the vesicular boundaries producing long-lived out-of-equilibrium morphologies and cooperative behaviors. <br/><br/>Drawing from recent experiments in our lab employing giant vesicles containing (or excluding) molecular (e.g., sugars) and colligatively non-ideal macromolecular (e.g., PEG and Dextran) osmolytes, this talk considers how the osmotic activity of water dynamically remodels the membrane.  It highlights experimental observations of shape adaptations (including protrusions, invaginations, and buds) and topological division (producing colonies of daughter vesicles) when subject to hypertonic baoth and examines the domain dynamics under hypotonic bath.

Domain dynamics and shape adaptations in osmotically stressed giant lipid vesicles

2019 Spring National Meeting

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