Résumé:

Fabrication of vesicles, a close membrane made of an amphiphile bilayer, has great potentiality for encapsulation and controlled release in chemical, food or biomedical industries but also from a more fundamental point of view for the design of biomimetic objects. Methods based on lipid film hydratation1, inverse emulsion techniques2 and more recently microfluidic techniques such as double emulsion3 or jetting4 method are limited either by a low yield, a low reproducibility, a poor control on the size, or by the presence of remaining solvent or defects. We propose a fast and robust method5 easy to implement: Continuous droplet interface crossing encapsulation (cDICE), that allows the production of defect-free vesicles at high-yield with a control in size and content. The vesicles have controlled bilayer composition with a polydispersity in size lower than 11%. we have shown that solutions as diverse as actin, cells, micrometric colloids, protein and high ionic strength solutions can easily be encapsulated using this process. By adjusting the parameters of our set-up, we are able to produce vesicles in the range 4-100 µm in diameter, stable for weeks. We believe this method open new perspectives for the design of biomimetic systems and even artificial tissues. [1] M. I. Angelova and D. S. Dimitrov, Faraday Discuss., 1986, 81, 303. [2] S. Pautot, B. J. Frisken and D. A. Weitz, Langmuir, 2003, 19, 28702879; S. Pautot, B. J. Frisken and D. A. Weitz, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., 2003, 100, 10718. [3] H. C. Shum, D. Lee, I. Yoon, T. Kodger and D. A. Weitz, Langmuir, 2008, 24, 7651. [4] J. C. Stachowiak, D. L. Richmond, T. H. Li, A. P. Liu, S. H. Parekh and D. A. Fletcher, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., 2008, 105, 4697. [5] M. Abkarian, E. Loiseau and G. Massiera, Soft Matter, 2011, DOI: 10.1039/c1sm05239j.