China has developed a technology to disperse a large number of giant vesicles (liposomes). The technology involves the adsorption of lipids onto porous materials like "cotton candy gel", and then extruding them by impregnating the buffer solution. The technology is published in the Langmuir magazine. The topic is "large scale vesicles can be prepared in large scale by extruding cotton candy like silica gel in lipid buffer."
The work was carried out by Dr. Gen Hayase, an associate professor at the Institute of Frontier Cross-disciplinary Sciences of Northeast University, and Dr. Shinomiro Nomura, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Engineering Robots, Department of Robotics, Northeast University. It is expected that this simple method can be used not only as a cell research tool requiring giant vesicles, but also in medicine and cosmetology.


Giant vesicles (GV) are liposomes consisting of phospholipid membranes. They are similar in structure to living cells and have a size of several microns. Therefore, it has been used in various biochemical experiments, such as introducing functional molecules into living cells, and can also be used to make containers for the study of artificial cells and molecular robots.


At present, many methods have been proposed to prepare giant vesicle dispersions, but in the laboratory, the production of hundreds of milliliters at a time is limited by the site. In 2011, Nomura found that giant vesicles were formed by squeezing lipids into porous polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) in a buffer solution.


The actual development and efficiency improvement of the generation methods of giant vesicles are mainly achieved through the use of porous silicone materials with flexible porous materials. In view of their high viscosity, they are described as "cotton candy gels".