When a dry mass of lipids encounters water, a spectacular interfacial instability sets in. It gives rise to the formation of ensembles of fingerlike tubular protrusions called myelin figures - tens of micrometers wide and tens to hundreds of micrometers long - representing a novel class of nonequilibrium higher-order self-organization. This talk will present recent results describing myelinic organization of phase-separating mixtures of unsaturated lipid, cholesterol, and sphingomyelin. Specifically, we show that these multicomponent myelins break symmetry and couple their compositional degrees of freedom with the extended myelinic morphology: They produce complementary, interlamellar radial gradients of concentrations of cholesterol (and sphingomyelin) and unsaturated lipid, which stands in stark contrast to interlamellar, lateral phase separation in equilibrated morphologies. We reason that such gradient structures arise through kinetic differences in the information processing of hydration characteristics of individual molecules while expending energy dictate this novel behavior of lipid mixtures undergoing hydration.

Myelin figures: Hydration-induced self-organization of lipids into cylindrical smectic liquid crystals

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.