Issue 47, 2023

Dehydration of biological membranes in a non-condensing environment

Abstract

The study of the dehydration process in a cell membrane allows a better understanding of how water is bound to it. While in prior studies, cell dehydration was commonly analyzed under osmotic stress conditions, in the present work, we focus on the dehydration driven by evaporation in a restricted condensing environment. Using a thermogravimetry method, we studied the dehydration of Escherichia coli through isothermal evaporation in the presence of a gas flux. To figure out the loss of mass in this situation, we first evaluated the dynamics of water evaporation of a suspension of multilamellar liposomes. We found that the evaporation of liposomal suspensions composed of individual lipids is constant, although slightly restricted by the presence of liposomes, while the evaporation of liposomal suspensions composed of a mixture of different lipids follows an exponential decay. This is explained considering that the internal pressure at the air–water interface is proportional to the amount of bound water. The evaporation of water from a biomass sample follows this latter behaviour.

Graphical abstract: Dehydration of biological membranes in a non-condensing environment

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
04 Sep 2023
Accepted
10 Nov 2023
First published
15 Nov 2023
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Soft Matter, 2023,19, 9173-9178

Dehydration of biological membranes in a non-condensing environment

G. Hernández-Galván and H. Mercado-Uribe, Soft Matter, 2023, 19, 9173 DOI: 10.1039/D3SM01181J

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