How are you planning to prepare your specimens?

I have not worked with liposomes, I just know that it is a difficult specimen for SEM. Some people use freeze-fracture (works for most specimens), or environmental SEM (works for some), or just conventional SEM - liposoemes can shrunk, crystallize (or not?), but they still are visible. So, it is best to test your specimens with different specimen preparation techniques before you decide what do you need to buy.

Cryo SEM is expensive, ESEM is a bit more expensive than conventional SEM, and there are a number of conventional SEMs in $80-$110K price range.

Dear Researcher,

You must use the suitable solvent for your specimen and after appropriate sonication, it will be possible for you to take excellent FE-SEM images.

Hi,

Why not considering AFM?

One advantage of this technique is simple sample preparation, as described in literature also:

Sample preparation for these techniques is very mild and simple and does not necessarily involve treatments such as vacuum, freeze fracture, fixation, embedding, and staining. However, such procedures can be performed on SPM [i.e. AFM, STM, etc.] specimen if required. In contrast to most conventional biological imaging methods, specimens investigated by SPM can be in a native, unlabeled state and investigated in their native environment for long periods of

time without significant damage (Muller and Anderson, 2002).

We can provide you brand new AFM for $55k if it helps.

Vladimir Dusevich Asghar Narmani M. R. Mozafari

Thank you for replies. We will be using non-pharmaceutical liposomal supplements on the market, vitamin C, curcumin, GSH etc to determine whether in fact these products contain intact liposomes or even nano sized particles at all. We know ascorbic acid has a negative effect on membrane integrity, as liposomes are pH sensitive, so a product claiming to be liposomal ascorbic acid begs the question, how are them liposomes stable?

So I want to test whether such products are what they claim to be, ie nano-size particles, intact liposomes, and even distribution and no excessive particle aggregation are what I'm looking for, possibly to differentiate micelles from liposomes as well?

Can I determine these characteristics by taking a sample of the liquid solution directly out of the pot and analysing it native? perhaps AFM sounds appropriate for this? We also need high quality pictures.

I am sorry, I cannot help you. Your question is very specific and its outside of my field of expertise. It looks like you will not find help on RG, it is mostly for beginners, not many solid researchers are participating in it. I would suggest to look for an expert in your field with the help of publications and/or personal contacts.

Dear Researcher,

If you are looking for size and aggregate characterization, you need to TEM or HR TEM; If you are searching for size distribution and relation of particles, I suggest FE-SEM; if you are going to find surface analysis of particles and evaluation of surface conjugation (and size analysis is not matter for your work), I offer to use AFM characterization devise.

Thank you for all the help