Self-assembly of size-controlled liposomes on DNA nanotemplates

Artificial lipid-bilayer membranes are valuable tools for the study of membrane structure and dynamics. For applications such as studying vesicular transport and drug delivery, there is a pressing need for artificial vesicles with controlled size. However, controlling vesicle size and shape with nanometer precision is challenging and approaches to achieve this can be heavily affected by lipid composition. Here we present a bio-inspired templating method to generate highly monodispersed sub-100nm unilamellar vesicles, where liposome self-assembly was nucleated and confined inside rigid DNA nanotemplates. Using this method we produced homogenous liposomes with four distinct pre-defined sizes. We also show that the method can be used with a variety of lipid compositions and probed the mechanism of the templated liposome formation by capturing key intermediates during membrane self-assembly. The DNA nanotemplating strategy represents a conceptually novel way to guide the lipid bilayer formation, and could be generalized to engineer complex membrane/protein structures with nanoscale precision.