Crystal Growth at Air-Liquid Interfaces

8 Weissbuch, L, Addadi, L., Berkovitch-Yellin, Z., Gati, E., Lahav, M., Leiserowitz, L., Spontaneous generation and amplification of optical-activity in a-amino-acids by enantioselective occlusion into centrosymmetric crystals of glycine , Nature 1984, 310, 161-164. 

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In the first step, lipid model membranes have been generated (Fig. 15) on the air/liquid interface, on a glass micropipette (see Section VIII.A.1), and on an aperture that separates two cells filled with subphase (see Section VIII.A.2). Further, amphiphilic lipid molecules have been self-assembled in an aqueous medium surrounding unilamellar vesicles (see Section VIII.A.3). Subsequently, the S-layer protein of B. coagulans E38/vl, B. stearother-mophilus PV72/p2, or B. sphaericus CCM 2177 have been injected into the aqueous subphase (Fig. 15). As on solid supports, crystal growth of S-layer lattices on planar or vesicular lipid films is initiated simultaneously at many randomly distributed nucleation... 

At the most fundamental level, monolayers of surfactants at an air-liquid interface serve as model systems to examine condensed matter phenomena. As we see briefly in Section 7.4, a rich variety of phases and structures occurs in such films, and phenomena such as nucleation, dendritic growth, and crystallization can be studied by a number of methods. Moreover, monolayers and bilayers of lipids can be used to model biological membranes and to produce vesicles and liposomes for potential applications in artificial blood substitutes and drug delivery systems (see, for example, Vignette 1.3 on liposomes in Chapter 1). 

Another example is dendritic crystal growth under diffusion-limited conditions accompanied by potential or current oscillations. Wang et al. reported that electrodeposition of Cu and Zn in ultra-thin electrolyte showed electrochemical oscillation, giving beautiful nanostmctured filaments of the deposits [27,28]. Saliba et al. found a potential oscillation in the electrodeposition of Au at a liquid/air interface, in which the Au electrodeposition proceeds specifically along the liquid/air interface, producing thin films with concentric-circle patterns at the interface [29, 30]. Although only two-dimensional ordered structures are formed in these examples because of the quasi-two-dimensional field for electrodeposition, very recently, we found that... 

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