Cover Picture: A Cholesterol‐Based Tether for Creating Photopatterned Lipid Membrane Arrays on both a Silica and Gold Surface (Chem. Eur. J. 26/2009)

A cholesterol‐based membrane tether…? system has been developed, for the attachment of lipid bilayer membranes at silica and gold surfaces, by S. D. Evans et al. in their Full Paper on page 6363 ff. Arrays of membrane have been produced by using deep UV lithography on both metallic and insulating substrates. Their response to electric fields demonstrates the formation of highly resistive, fluid membranes.

     

Cover Picture: A Microfluidic Approach to Chemically Driven Assembly of Colloidal Particles at Gas–Liquid Interfaces (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 29/2009)

A chemically mediated microfluidic approach to the generation of particle‐coated bubbles is reported by E. Kumacheva and co‐workers in their Communication on page 5300 ff. The approach employs rapid, controllable dissolution of CO₂ bubbles in a dispersion of carboxylated particles. Local increases in the acidity of the medium in the neighborhood of the bubbles lead to a change in the surface energy of the particles and their deposition on the gas–liquid interface.