Narrow Results

It is demonstrated that the apex of a circular biconcave vesicle of fluid membrane can shift toward to (or away from) the center depending on the increase (or decrease) of the osmotic pressure.

By exploiting the eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix, which are the second derivatives of the bending energy of shapes obtained using the software Surface Evolver, we partly show the stable phase diagrams of several starfish vesicles. The work indicates that most of the phase transforms are discontinuous and most of the nonaxisymmetric shapes are metastable shapes according to the spontaneous curvature (SC) model. We also find two kinds of stable new starfish shapes and a continuous phase transform in the SC model.

Following the previous theoretical study on the open lipid membranes with edges by Tu and Ou-Yang [Phys. Rev. E68, 061915 (2003)], we show that the discocyte solution can give us several interesting open vesicles with two edges and the central singularity of this solution can be avoided in the meantime.

In the course of our investigations of routes for general and convenient synthesis of amphiphiles derived from sugars, we reported new synthetic ways to prepare catanionic surfactants, polymers and dendrimers using unprotected lactose or lactobionic acid. Moreover we developed amphiphilic dendrimers bearing sugar polar heads. These compounds are of interest for their biological applications (mimics of natural ligands of proteins (e.g. gp 120 of HIV), encapsulation, vectorisation).

The use of engineered antigen carriers to optimize the immune response to recombinant subunit vaccines has seen great advances in recent years. Optimization can take several forms, such as facilitating stimulation of certain immune cells or amplifying the adjuvancy effect of the vaccine formulation. In this paper, we applied dose/response analysis to demonstrate the ability of outer membrane vesicle (OMV) antigen carriers derived from engineered Escherichia coli to produce strong antigen-specific immune responses to a model antigen at a significantly decreased antigen load compared to an industry standard alum-based control. Inflammopathology and histological analysis of extended studies further supported a capacity to enhance immune cell recruitment locally at the injection site while decreasing inflammation and eliminating injection site scaring. The results indicate a strong potential for OMV-based vaccines as recombinant antigen delivery vehicles, affording strong immunogenicity at low doses with a broadly applicable platform for recombinant subunit antigen inclusion.