By Anna Hernandez


A liposome, an artificial vesicle comprises a double layer of fatty acids. It may be used as tools utilized to administer nutrients and pharmaceutical drugs to your body systems. They may be made by disrupting some biological membranes which may somehow involve sonication.

Liposomes are usually made of natural phospholipids. Furthermore, they may also be made of mixed lipid chains containing surfactant properties. Such lipid chains may include egg phosphatidylethanolamine. The design for this vesicle may adopt surface ligands used for attaching to tissues that are not healthy.

There are different types of these artificial lipid rich vesicles. The main types of liposomes include multilamellar vesicle which is abbreviated as MLV, a small unilamellar vesicle which is shortened as SUV, a large unilamellar vesicle whose abbreviation is LUV, and finally the cochleate vesicle.

These products can easily be confused with micelles and reverse micelles. This might occur because they are nearly similar in structure. Their only difference is that liposomes have a double layer of lipids whereas micelles as well as reverse micelles are made of single layers of lipids.

The membrane of the structure comprises of phospholipids that alludes to the molecules having tail groups and head groups. Their heads get attracted to water. However, the tail is made of only a long chain of hydrocarbons hence usually get repelled by water.

The hydrophilic heads do form the outer layer while the hydrophobic tails form the inner layer. This is because the heads are attracted by water while the tails are repelled by water. However, in each cell, one layer of heads does face outside, attracted to the surrounding water. The other layer of heads on the other hand faces inside cell, attracted to the water that is found inside the cell. However, the hydrophobic tails of the outer layer face the hydrophobic tails of the inner layer, thus forming a bilayer structure.

Liposomes were made first by a British hematologist, Dr. Alec Bangham, 1961 in the Babraham Institute at Cambridge. However, its publication took place later in 1964. They were simply found to bear a resemblance to plasmalemmas. This was demonstrated by pictures which were formed by the microscope which Bangham had used.

They encapsulate an aqueous solution using a hydrophobic membrane. Water insoluble chemicals can easily pass through the membranes while the water-soluble ones not. However, dissolved hydrophilic solutes can readily pass through the hydrophilic heads. For this reason, it can be used to deliver both hydrophobic and hydrophilic molecules. It delivers its contents by fusing with other structures with bilayer walls such as cell membranes.

These vesicles are used in both drug and gene delivery application. The drugs and the DNA to be delivered are usually made to contain the pH that is suitable for the functions of the liposome. Its use in the transformation of DNA is called lipofection. Furthermore, it can also be used to deliver dyes to textiles, enzymes and dietary supplements to foods, pesticides to plants and also cosmetics to skin.




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