iGUVs: Preparing Giant Unilamellar Vesicles with a Smartphone and Lipids Easily Extracted from Chicken Eggs Víctor G. Almendro Vedia, †,‡ Paolo Natale, †,‡ Su Chen, § Francisco Monroy, †,‡ Ve ́ ronique Rosilio, ∥ and Iva ́ n Ló pez-Montero* ,†,‡ † Departamento de Química Física I, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Avenida Complutense s/n, 28040 Madrid, Spain ‡ Instituto de Investigació n Hospital Doce de Octubre (i+12), Avenida de Có rdoba s/n, 28041 Madrid, Spain § Institut Curie, UMR 9187 CNRS, INSERM U1196, Univ Paris-Sud - Universite ́ Paris-Saclay, 91405 Orsay, France ∥ UMR 8612 CNRS, Univ Paris-Sud - Universite ́ Paris-Saclay, 5 Rue Jean-Baptiste Cle ́ ment, 92290 Châ tenay-Malabry, France * S Supporting Information ABSTRACT: Since the first report of electroformed micrometer- sized liposomes in the 1980s, giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) have generated a lot of interest in the biophysical and bio- chemical communities. However, their penetration rate in high school or at the undergraduate level is still limited because of the requirement of specialized materials for their fabrication. The main objective of this article is to translate the manufacture of these interesting microsystems from highly specialized research laboratories to general chemistry or biology laboratories with the help of everyday objects. Vesicles are made of lipids, which can easily be extracted from chicken eggs. Once obtained, the lipids can be reassembled to form giant vesicular structures in a sugar/ aqueous medium by using a do-it-yourself electroformation device. For that, the homemade electroformation chamber is plugged into the audio output of a smartphone or a tablet, which generates audio signals with variable amplitude and frequency. These GUVs prepared with a smart device (iGUVs) are then resuspended into a salt solution for their visualization under a simple microscope. iGUVs bring the opportunity to teachers to stimulate scientific discussion from a wide variety of scientific disciplines such as colloidal chemistry, biophysical chemistry, statistics and cell biology. KEYWORDS: High School/Introductory Chemistry, First-Year Undergraduate/General, Graduate Education/Research, Biochemistry, Physical Chemistry, Hands-On Learning/Manipulatives, Biophysical Chemistry, Colloids, Lipids, Membranes S elf-assembly of macromolecular entities seems to be one of the keys to the understanding of a central question in biology: how early life was able to be organized. 1 Membrane self-assembly as cell-like capsules has been straightforwardly described for lipids, one of the most elemental structural com- ponents of life. The amphiphilic nature of lipids allows them to be organized as many different forms, and lipid polymorphism is usually studied as a prototypical case of molecular self-assembly. Through spontaneous processes lipids can self-assemble into vesicles via hydrophobic interactions. 2 Vesicles are containers that separate their inner content from the outside by a lipid membrane, leading to compartmentalization, which is considered an important principle for the development of life. Lipid pre- cursors in primitive Earth could have spontaneously assembled to form vesicle structures. Scientists try to understand the minimal principles that could lead to growth or division of protocells with the aim to construct minimal cells and artificial life. 3 Mimicry and bottom-up synthetic approaches represent today the main experimental strategies to reproduce minimal life conditions. Most of these methodologies are founded on vesicle-based science. Many alternatives have been proposed to reproducibly produce cell-sized vesicles in mass. In particular, Angelova et al. 4 developed the electroformation method to obtain vesicles with diameters larger than 10 μm that can easily be observed through an optical microscope. These vesicles were formed by one bilayer sheet (unilamellar) and thus are called giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs). The method described by Angelova et al. consists of spreading an organic solution of lipids over electrically conductive platinum electrodes. Hydration of the dried lipid film for several hours in the presence of an alternating current (AC) electric field clusters the lipids and detaches them from the surface to form lipid vesicles in suspension. The electroformation method was standardized by spreading the lipid film onto conductive glass plates. 5 The electroformed vesicles are perfectly spherical and can be obtained with different types of lipids. However, the AC electric field is powered with a function generator, which is not usually available to most high school laboratories. We aim to overcome this difficulty and show the production of giant vesicles using everyday materials such as eggs, salt, and a smartphone. Received: December 10, 2016 Revised: March 7, 2017 Laboratory Experiment pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc © XXXX American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc. A DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.6b00951 J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX