Dehydration/Rehydration Cycles for Mixing Phospholipids without the Use of Organic Solvents

An environmentally friendly and straightforward dehydration/rehydration method for glycerophospholipid mixing that avoids the use of organic solvents, cosolvents, or additives was developed. We prepared binary mixtures of zwitterionic and anionic glycerophospholipids using only deionized water in the entire mixing process. The resulting lipid films were subsequently reconstituted in vesicular form and compared to controls using differential scanning calorimetry. The calorimetric scans revealed no significant differences between mixing methods for any of the studied cases. These findings suggest that the developed dehydration/rehydration procedure creates a sample with equivalent compositional uniformity than the conventional solvent evaporation technique.