Now who'd think of that ?

Amazing !

Despite walking for 30 minutes to the Faculty of Applied Science in the main campus, the talk by Professor John Seddon was very cool and i like his style of linking Chemistry to its application.


He was talking about miscelles and inverse miscelles and their phase kinetics. Although i am not very sure about the part of him comparing the hexagonal close packed structures of miscelles under diffferent conditions and the 3 dimensional inverse micellar lyotropic phase, it was interesting to note how he predicted the application for the miscelles and its inverse together with other amphiphiles.

A micelle

A miscelle is an aggregation of molecules which has a hydrophobic tail and a hydrophilic head e.g. phospholipid. In an aqueous solution, the hydrophilic head will be attracted to the water molecules while the hydrophobic tails will all arrange themselves to face inward hence, producing a ball-like structure.

He was showing the X-ray Diffraction patterns for micelles and he also talked about one Pressure-induced phase transitions of micelle surfacants.

He said that, in certain conditions, we can use a micelle system to trap protein. If we apply pressure, instead of straightening out, the micelles will assume the saddle position to reduce the curvature and one way of doing that is the having the micelle system to expand.

So, with that, we can actually trap proteins with a micelle systems and crystallize them. Cool huh ? All we have to do is apply high pressure for the micelle to expand, let the protein diffuse into the micelle and then reduce the pressure to shrink the micelle and voila !, we have our trapped protein ready for extraction.

Now, really, who'd think of that ?

Another application of micelle is for drug delivery system.

HII is the hexagonal phase inverse micelle and HI is that of micelle.
It actually forms a long nanotube and that could actually be used to delivery water in a nano system e.g. for nanoreactors or chemicals that could act as a drug into our biological system.

Different conformations

Niceee wei.....