Detection of intralayer alignment in multicomponent lipids by dynamic speckle pattern analysis.

Multicomponent mixtures of bilayer lipids, thanks to the coexistence of liquid-crystalline phases in their structures, may be used in the development of functional membranes. In such membranes interlayer ordering distributes across membrane lamellae, resulting in long-range alignment of phase-separated domains. In this paper, we explore the dynamics of this phenomenon by laser speckle pattern analysis. We show that cholesterol content decreases the activity, and the rate of the domains size development is related to the change of physical roughness of the multicomponent lipid mixture. Our results are in agreement with the previous experimental reports. However, our experimental procedure is an easy-to-implement and effective methodology.