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Soft Matter

Where physics meets chemistry meets biology for fundamental soft matter research.



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Review

Soft Matter, 2007, 3, 817 - 827, DOI: 10.1039/b703580b

Giant vesicles in electric fields

Rumiana Dimova, Karin A. Riske, Said Aranda, Natalya Bezlyepkina, Roland L. Knorr and Reinhard Lipowsky

This review is dedicated to electric field effects on giant unilamellar vesicles, a cell-size membrane system. We summarize various types of behavior observed when vesicles are subjected either to weak AC fields at various frequency, or to strong DC pulses. Different processes such as electro-deformation, -poration and -fusion of giant vesicles are considered. We describe some recent developments, which allowed us to detect the dynamics of the vesicle response with a resolution below milliseconds for all of these processes. Novel aspects on electric field effects on vesicles in the gel phase are introduced.

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