Studies of electric capacitance of membranes

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Abstract
The electric capacitance and conductance of a model membrane composed of a hydrophobic filter paper and a synthetic lipid analogue, i.e., dioleylphosphate, immersed in an electrolyte solution were observed with various frequencies ranging from 20 to 3×106 Hz. With successive increase of salt concentration in the external solution, the capacitance and conductance of the membrane increased discontinuously at a certain critical value of the external salt concentration. This variation of the capacitance and conductance of the membrane with the salt concentration was found to be reversible, and the critical value of salt concentration was independent of the adsorbed quantity of the lipid, and of the pore size of the filter paper as far as the adsorbed quantity of the dioleylphosphate was large. A theoretical analysis based on the membrane model for the filter paper-phospholipid system proposed in Part I of this series revealed that the dioleylphosphate impregnated in the filter paper changed its conformation from oil droplets or globular micelles to a number of bilayer membranes when the salt concentration reached the critical value for a given pair of electrolyte species and the membrane. The conformational change of the lipid analogue in the filter paper is discussed in connection with the ability of formation and stability of a black bilayer membrane of the dioleylphosphate.

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