Experimental Determination of High-Order Bending Elastic Constants of Lipid Bilayers

We present a method to describe the formation of small lipid vesicles in terms of three bending elastic constants that can be experimentally measured. Our method combines a general expression of the elastic free energy of the bilayer and the thermodynamic description of molecular aggregation. The resulting model requires the size distribution of liposomes, which is determined from the X-ray scattered intensity spectra of vesicular dispersions. By using two different preparation methods, we studied a series of vesicular solutions made of distinct lipids and we obtained their corresponding bending elastic constants that are consistent with known bending rigidities.