Mechanical properties of bare and protein-coated giant unilamellar phospholipid vesicles. A comparative study of micropipet aspiration and atomic force microscopy.

In this study, protein-coated giant phospholipid vesicles were used to model cell plasma membranes coated by surface protein layers that increase membrane stiffness under mechanical or osmotic stress. These changed mechanical properties like bending stiffness, membrane area compressibility modulus, and effective Young's modulus were determined by micropipet aspiration, while bending stiffness, effective Young's modulus, and effective spring constant of vesicles were analyzed by AFM. The experimental setups, the applied models, and the results using both methods were compared here. As demonstrated before, we found that bare vesicles were best probed by micropipet aspiration due to its high sensitivity. The mechanical properties of vesicles with protein surface layers were, however, better determined by AFM because it enables very local deformations of the membrane with barely any structural damage to the protein layer. Mechanical properties of different species of coating proteins, here streptavidin and avidin, could be clearly distinguished using this technique.