This would be a very difficult experiment to do with normal lipids. You would have to trigger the formation of the bilayer somehow very quickly and then have a measurable property when the bilayer forms. The only way I could see it being done is through some photocaged lipid that cannot form a bilayer by itself but can when hit by light.

Note: There are a few experimental studies of bilayer formation.However this is on supported surfaces and measures the vesicle -> supported lipid bilayer transition, not the free lipid-> bilayer transition that I assume is being measured in your simulations.

Maybe this article is related with your search: Theoretical and experimental study of the interactions of annonaceous acetogenins with artificial lipid bilayers, José A. Bombasaro, Lilian Di Toto Blessing, Sonia Diaz, Adriana Neske, Fernando D. Suvire, Ricardo D. Enriz, Ana M. Rodríguez, Journal: Journal of Molecular Structure - J MOL STRUCT , vol. 1003, no. 1, pp. 87-91, 2011

You can use a lipid analogue as a fluorescent probe and measure fluorescence anisotropy, it should be changing from free in water to SUV, LUV formation. There are fluorescent lipid analogues with amphiphilic properties you can use , you can also use flow cytometry to quantify the number of mycelles if they are big enough, of course.

This article might be of interest for you (experiment + MD simulations).

Here it is. Good luck.

There are a couple of papers which show the monitoring of formation of lipid bilayers on substrates using QCM studies. I have attached the most relevant ones. HOpe it helps!

This one too

Many thanks for all answers and the suggested publications! I will need some time to review them all and will then add another comment of whether or not I found what I needed for my research.

Again, the idea was to verify or falsify the timescale at which lipid molecules form a bilayer membrane as suggested by in silico molecular dynamics simulations. I have interesting simulation results, that show that the clustering of lipids seems to work in different steps: First, several lipids find together to form their own, separate clusters, and then I can observe, how these clusters keep on aggregating until finally only one huge lipid membrane has emerged. This is really fascinating to see and I wondered if anything similar to this has been seen in real experiments, either in vitro or even in vivo.

A publication of these results is in preparation.

When looking for corresponding experimental publications in Cells, Nature or Science, I was amazed that biologists and biochemists - as far as I could judge - have not so much been interested in the timescale itself when lipids build bilayers (which is an interesting question for a physicist), but much more on specific biochemical pathways or reactions that occur with particular proteins in specific experimental systems, often connected with interfaces or surfaces, e.g. protein binding. Also I think, comparison of MD results with experiments here seems to be particularly difficult, as there is not a prototypical "membrane", but very many membranes with their chemical composition depending on the system (cell type, organelle, etc.) under investigation. It's just, that I would have expected, that some chemists' had just thrown some sample lipid molecules into an organic or aqueous solvent to measure some reaction kinetics and to actually OBSERVE the formation of lipids, like in a movie, maybe with high-speed cameras, attached to a flourescence microscope, but apparently this is not the case.

You can use flow cytometry.

To directly measure the kinetics of bilayer formation, you would need a mixing apparatus to trigger the solution->vesicle transition which can mix the sample in less than a nanosecond, which doesn't exist (the best are around 1 ms). I am fairly confident the kinetics of vesicle formation from free lipids in solution has not been directly measured experimentally.

Experimentally it is difficult to answer this question. On the nanosecond-to-microsecond timescale you can run Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations. The paper I cited above is an example of a such study (for DisorbitoylPC). In principle, any lipid can be used instead. Maybe it is good to vary starting conditions...

How much energy might it take to form 1 square micron of bilayer from already synthesized phospholipid.