Publications

Lipid membranes on nanostructured silicon

Sasaki, Darryl Y.; Slade, Andrea L.

A unique composite nanoscale architecture that combines the self-organization and molecular dynamics of lipid membranes with a corrugated nanotextured silicon wafer was prepared and characterized with fluorescence microscopy and scanning probe microscopy. The goal of this project was to understand how such structures can be assembled for supported membrane research and how the interfacial interactions between the solid substrate and the soft, self-assembled material create unique physical and mechanical behavior through the confinement of phases in the membrane. The nanometer scale structure of the silicon wafer was produced through interference lithography followed by anisotropic wet etching. For the present study, a line pattern with 100 nm line widths, 200 nm depth and a pitch of 360 nm pitch was fabricated. Lipid membranes were successfully adsorbed on the structured silicon surface via membrane fusion techniques. The surface topology of the bilayer-Si structure was imaged using in situ tapping mode atomic force microscopy (AFM). The membrane was observed to drape over the silicon structure producing an undulated topology with amplitude of 40 nm that matched the 360 nm pitch of the silicon structure. Fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) experiments found that on the microscale those same structures exhibit anisotropic lipid mobility that was coincident with the silicon substructure. The results showed that while the lipid membrane maintains much of its self-assembled structure in the composite architecture, the silicon substructure indeed influences the dynamics of the molecular motion within the membrane.