Dynamic light scattering from polydisperse suspensions of thin ellipsoidal shells of revolution with submicron...

Osmotic swelling of membrane vesicles has been studied in combination with dynamic light scattering, to obtain information about the elastic properties of biomembranes. In such studies, there arise some technical problems specific to dynamic light scattering, which include the effects on the light-scattering results of the size distribution and nonsphericity of the vesicles with submicron sizes. Even for highly monodisperse suspensions of spherical vesicles (sigma/dn = [(the mean of d2)/d2n-1]1/2 = 0.1; dn being the number-average diameter of vesicles), the average diameter d obtained from dynamic light scattering is shown to be strongly dependent on dnK, where K is the length of the scattering vector. This is solely due to the shell structure of the vesicles. For ellipsoidal vesicles, another complication appears which is due to the rotational motion of ellipsoids.