Soft Nanoonions: A Dynamic Overview onto Catanionic Vesicles Temperature-Driven Transition

• Autor(a) principal: Milcovich, Gesmi
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Antunes, Filipe E., Grassi, Mario, Asaro, Fioretta
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10316/106216; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21186804
• topic: catanionic vesicles; diffusion; NMR; nanoreservoirs; microscopy; Anions; Cations; Cetrimonium Compounds; Micelles; Microscopy, Confocal; Nanotubes, Carbon; Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Biomolecular; Phase Transition; Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate; Surface-Active Agents; Temperature

Catanionic vesicles are emerging interesting structures for bioapplications. They self-generate by a pairing of oppositely charged ionic surfactants that assemble into hollow structures. Specifically, the anionic-cationic surfactant pair assumes a double-tailed zwitterionic behavior. In this work, the multilamellar-to-unilamellar thermal transition of several mixed aqueous systems, with a slight excess of the anionic one, were investigated. Interestingly, it was found that the anionic counterion underwent a dissociation as a consequence of a temperature increase, leading to the mentioned thermal transition. The present work proposed the spectroscopic techniques, specifically multinuclear NMR and PGSTE (pulsed gradient stimulated echo), as a key tool to study such systems, with high accuracy and effectiveness, while requiring a small amount of the sample. The results presented herein evidence encouraging perspectives, forecasting the application of the studied vesicular nanoreservoirs, for e.g., drug delivery.