Effects of hydrostatic pressure on lipid and surfactant phases

In the last years a number of advances have been made in our understanding of the high pressure phase behaviour of lipid and surfactant systems, in particular of phospholipid bilayers which can serve as model biomembrane systems. Hydrostatic pressure has been used as a physical parameter for studying the stability and energetics of lyotropic lipid mesophases, but also because high pressure is an important feature of certain natural membrane environments (e.g. of marine biotopes) and because the high pressure phase behaviour of biomolecules is of biotechnological interest (e.g. for high pressure food processing). It has been demonstrated that temperature and pressure have non-congruent effects on the structural and phase behaviour of these systems. By using the pressure–jump relaxation technique in combination with time-resolved synchrotron X-ray diffraction, the kinetics of different mesophase transformations was also investigated.