A new approach to look at membrane in plane organisation via giSANS

Biological membrane in plane organisation is a challenging topic, specially since it has been suggested to depend on curvature. So far the main approach to study curvature induces in plane phase separation has been through the approach of fluorescent techniques and liposomes. Here we propose to use grazing angle small angle neutron scattering to explore the signal from a well ordered nanoparticle coated surface and use it as a solid substrate to form curved supported lipid bilayers by vesicle fusion. The curvature of the membranes will be tuned by the size of the nanoparticles in the surface coating.