Charged membranes composed of self-assembled charged lipids are ubiquitous in nature. The interactions of charged lipids with ions in aqueous solutions is hugely important and yet not well understood.  

• We showed that entopic effects (that strengthen with temperature) can partially melt multilamellar phase of charged lipids, below a critical lipid concentration (of ca. 15wt%). This process is reversible and leads to the formation of a disordered lipid phase that coexists with a more condensed lamellar phase, despite the repulsive interactions between the charged membranes. This phenomenon occurs under a wide range of conditions and other types of charged self-assembled structures (read more).
• We demonstrated that under strong confinement, attained by either osmotic stress, ionic liquids, or salt solution, the counterions of charged membranes condense back into the surface of the bilayer (read more).
• Using our in-house X-ray scattering setup, we followed (over few hours) the structural changes associated with the crystallization process of lipid bilayers, induced by zinc ions (read moe).
• Multivalent ion correlations tightly couple oppositely charged membranes. The extent of coupling weakens with increasing temperature and decreasing membrane charge density (read more).