Vesicles as Osmotic Motors
- 21 June 1999
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review Letters
- Vol. 82 (25) , 5168-5171
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.82.5168
Abstract
We report on a quantitative study of the motion of model osmotic motors—lipid vesicles in a solute concentration gradient. The vesicles move through recoil produced by osmotic pumping, but the transformation of entropic osmotic energy into mechanical motion is found to be unexpectedly efficient: The drift velocity is more than 3 orders of magnitude faster than predicted by linearized nonequilibrium thermodynamics.Keywords
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