Polymeric Bimolecular Lipid Membranes

Unfortunately, BLMs are by far the least stable system among the membrane models illustrated in Fig. 5. In general, they can only exist when the lipid molecules are in the liquid-crystalline state. When a fluid BLM is cooled below the phase transition temperature of the lipid, the membrane is disrupted instantly. Moreover, even fluid 

BLMs have lifetimes not exceeding minutes or hours. Therefore, it was desirable to build up black lipid membranes of high long-term stability. 

Out of a variety of polymerizable lipids tested for possible use of bilayer formation, only three systems exhibited BLM lifetimes of more than a few minutes (Table 2 26)). These BLMs were characterized by measuring their resistance and capacitance (Table 2., see26 for details). The data obtained were comparable with values obtained with egg lecithin the most frequently used material for preparing BLMs. 

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Planar bimolecular lipid membranes, also called black lipid membranes (BLM s) represent a further membrane model system, which is stable only for a few minutes up to several hours. All attempts to further stabilize these BLM s by diyne polymerization failed Diaoetylene compounds which have been studied are listed inTable 5. 

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