Preparation of multicompartment lipid-based systems based on vesicle interactions.

Various strategies for constructing artificial multicompartment vesicular systems, which primitively mimic the structure of eukaryotic cells, are presented. These model systems are appropriate for addressing several issues such as the understanding of cell processes, the development of nanoreactors and novel multicompartment delivery systems for specific drug applications, the transport through bilayer membranes, and also hypothesizing on the evolution of eukaryotic cells as originating from the symbiotic association of prokaryotes.