Abstract
The liposome dialyzer is a small-volume equilibrium dialysis device, built from commercially available materials, that is designed for the rapid exchange of small volumes of an extraliposomal reagent pool against a liposome preparation. The dialyzer is prepared by modification of commercially available dialysis cartridges (Slide-A-Lyzer cassettes), and it consists of a reactor with two 300-μl chambers and a 1.56-cm2 dialysis surface area. The dialyzer is prepared in three stages: (i) disassembling the dialysis cartridges to obtain the required parts, (ii) assembling the dialyzer and (iii) sealing the dialyzer with epoxy. Preparation of the dialyzer takes ∼1.5 h, not including overnight epoxy curing. Each round of dialysis takes 1-24 h, depending on the analyte and membrane used. We previously used the dialyzer for small-volume non-enzymatic RNA synthesis reactions inside fatty acid vesicles. In this protocol, we demonstrate other applications, including removal of unencapsulated calcein from vesicles, remote loading and vesicle microscopy.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 927-938 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Nature Protocols |
Volume | 10 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 30 2015 |
Funding
acknoWleDGMents This work was supported in part by The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Exobiology grant NNX07AJ09G to J.W.S. and in part by a grant (290363) from the Simons Foundation to J.W.S. A.E.E. and N.P.K. were supported by appointments to the NASA Postdoctoral Program, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities through a contract with NASA. A.E.E. was supported by a Tosteson Fellowship from the Massachusetts General Hospital Executive Committee on Research. J.W.S. is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology