Stephen Smith, Southern Utah University
Lipids are an important part of cell membranes. When in water, these lipids form a model cell shape called a vesicle. When lipid vesicles come in contact with smooth glass they form Supported Lipid Bilayers (SLB) which are unrolled, flattened, lipid vesicles on glass. These bilayers are important for the purification, separation, and study of cell membrane substituents. We form an SLB in a microfluidic device to study the conversion of bilayers into vesicles. As a fast-moving buffer flows over these bilayers, it disrupts the bilayer and strips portions of it from the glass. We hypothesize that these stripped lipids are then reformed into vesicles. However, we can only observe their stripping. We are building a particle analyzer to determine the number and size of the particles that are produced from stripping the bilayer. In our device, a laser shines on the solution from the stripping experiment and the scattered light is analyzed thus making a light scattering particle sizer.