David Whitten, Ph.D., Chemistry Department Vesicles are closed-membrane capsules consisting of single or multiple bilayers of noncovalently assembled surfactants.
Surfactants are molecules that have both polar head groups and two non-polar tail groups.
Vesicles have been used extensively as models for the study of biological membrane structure and function. In addition, vesicles have been investigated for use in drug delivery and targeting, medical imaging, catalysis, and separations. They were then analyzed by a laser light scattering technique and the two methods were compared. 17 nm as the actual radius of a DPPC vesicle. At first, we believed this discrepancy was caused by contamination during the preparation.