Phospholipid Monolayers

Abstract

The chapter describes various experimental and theoretical techniques. It shows how they were applied to phospholipids, what one could learn, and where the limitations are. The chapter tries to correlate results on phospholipid monolayers with those on other surfactant films that may lead to the elaboration of general physical principles and also suggest extrapolation to other phospholipids and more complex systems not yet studied as extensively. The monolayer, being half of a membrane, is a very well-defined planar system to study intermolecular interactions among lipids and also between lipids and proteins. Most of the basic principles of a phospholipid monolayer are typical for other insoluble monolayers and hence one may find many old ideas now becoming fashionable. However, whereas these original ideas are based only on indirect experimental observation and thus are close to speculations, there has been a tremendous development of experimental tools to investigate monolayer structure. These techniques have been to some extent applied to the best defined monolayers of glycerophosphatidyls with saturated aliphatic tails, and therefore this chapter concentrates mostly on these. © 1995 Elsevier B.V.