Hi Leonardo

I work with partially solid-supported bilayers, so not multilayers (in fact we try to avoid those), but I know from a colleague, that they use a centrifugation step to rupture and spread their vesicles. As far as I know multilamellar vesicles should rupture completely by this technique, including the multi-layers. I will try to find an according reference and post it here. What surfaces are you working on? Also the addition of higher concentrations of calcium ions should produce multilayers even from unilamellar vesicles (50-200 mM CaCl2). Thats from my personal experience when working with supported bilayers.

Hi Michael,

thank you for the answer. I am not working with lipids but with mixtures of surfactant and polyelectrolytes on silicon wafers. There are several options why calcium is not an option in my case (and, I do not believe it helps, as the vesicle is positively charged).

It would be great if you could find and share the appropriate reference. Unfortunately I was quite unsuccessful in this regard.

Best,

Leonardo

Dear Leonardo, I think that making defined 'multi-lipid layer structures' on a polyelectrolyte support is quite hard to do, unless you make lipid bilayer/polyelectrolyte/lipid bilayer... composites. For making supported bilayers the (unilamellar) vesicles have to adsorb, rupture and spread on the support resulting in a supported lipid membrane; if you use multilamellar vesicles/other structures you will just get undefined localized 'lipid blobs' on you sample.

if you are working with polyelectrolyte supports you might find some information here:

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2008/SM/b805754k#!divAbstract

one of the things described in there is a kind of 'polyelectrolyte/lipid sponge', with about 100X more lipid adsorbed on a PDADMAC surface than a 'normal' lipid bilayer.

good luck,

Martin