Microfluidics and giant vesicles: creation, capture, and applications for biomembranes

Since their first reported formation in the late 1960s [1], giant vesicles have proven to be invaluable research tools for many applications including but not limited to studies on the fundamentals of lipid membrane assembly/properties, drug discovery, and cell biology. Microfluidic technology, on the other hand, is a more recent tool (the first miniaturized systems emerged in the early 90s) which brings many advantages from scaling down by miniaturization. However, it has only been in the last 10 years that we have seen researchers combining these two fields to gain further insights from biomembranes and broaden their applications. Surprisingly it was not until the last few years, that researchers began to fully realize the potential of this marriage with has led to an explosion of works where giant vesicles are used with microfluidic systems. This can be broadly summarized into two fields where giant vesicles are either created by or analyzed within microfluidic platforms. This chapter aims to provide an overview of these two fields and to give the author's own opinion on future directions.