Super-swelled lyotropic single crystals

• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1710774114
• Publication Date: 2017-10-03T00:40:29Z
• Authors: Hojun Kim; Ziyuan Song; Cecilia Leal
• Keywords: Lyotropic

Significance Lipids self-assemble in water into diverse polycrystalline mesophases. The swelling capacity of these superstructures is finite, specific, and traditionally dictated by lipid composition. Bicontinuous cubic phases have tremendous potential drug delivery protein crystallization. However, limited caps unit cells at dimensions too small to encapsulate many drugs most proteins. In this work, we discovered that bicontinuous phase not solely determined Self-assembly conditions yield stable cell sizes fourfold larger than usual. Unexpectedly, also dictate mesophase ordering resulting X-ray electron microscopy diffraction patterns do conform polycrystallinity. Instead, macroscale super-swelled single crystals are encountered. This discovery highlights insights understanding self-assembled materials.