ABSTRACT
Subjecting giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) to electric fields offers a way to develop methods for assessing the membrane material properties and to manipulate vesicles without direct mechanical contact. In the last decade, a number of experimental tools have been developed to pull, squeeze, and even tear apart vesicles for the sake of learning something about the membrane. Squeezing the vesicles with AC fields, allows assessing the bending rigidity, the membrane capacitance and the vesicle excess area. By poking and making holes in it using DC pulses, one can measure the pore edge tension and assess membrane rheological properties). Occasionally, vesicles can be even “electrocuted” (vesicle bursting) to find out how stable their membrane is. The combination of AC fields and DC pulses allow also investigating the fusion of two vesicles, which turns out to be a handy way of transforming GUVs into microreactors or creating multicomponent membranes with precisely known composition on which tie lines can be deduced. All in all, electrifying the membrane is very useful and can be rewarding.
