pH-driven assembly of various supported lipid platforms: a comparative study on silicon oxide and titanium oxide

Supported lipid platforms are versatile cell membrane mimics whose structural properties can be tailored to suit the application of interest. By identifying parameters that control the self-assembly of these platforms, there is potential to develop advanced biomimetic systems that overcome the surface specificity of lipid vesicle interactions under physiological conditions. In this work, we investigated the adsorption kinetics of vesicles onto silicon and titanium oxides as a function of pH. On each substrate, a planar bilayer and a layer of intact vesicles could be self-assembled in a pH-dependent manner, demonstrating the role of surface charge density in the self-assembly process. Under acidic pH conditions where both zwitterionic lipid vesicles and the oxide films possess near-neutral electric surface charges, vesicle rupture could occur, demonstrating that the process is driven by nonelectrostatic interactions. However, we observed that the initial rupturing process is insufficient for propagating bilayer formation. The role of electrostatic interactions for propagating bilayer formation differs for the two substrates; electrostatic attraction between vesicles and the substrate is necessary for complete bilayer formation on titanium oxide but is not necessary on silicon oxide. Conversely, in the high pH regime, repulsive electrostatic interactions can result in the irreversible adsorption of intact vesicles on silicon oxide and even a reversibly adsorbed vesicle layer on titanium oxide. Together, the results show that pH is an effective tool to modulate vesicle-substrate interactions in order to create various self-assembled lipid platforms on hydrophilic substrates.