Double-emulsion templated lipid vesicles as minimal cell mimics for assembling tissue-like vesicular materials

Lipid vesicles formed using double-emulsion drops as templates exhibit uniform sizes and compositions. Despite these important advantages, conventional electroformation continues to be the selected approach for vesicle fabrication to understand biophysical processes in cells using simplified model systems. Here, we address critical aspects that could be hindering the extensive use of emulsion-templating strategies for vesicle fabrication and emphasize certain systematic studies that would help demonstrate further the advantages of microfluidic technologies. Besides the importance of controlling size and composition, we envision that the high throughput of this technology will allow the construction of vesicular materials with controlled architectures.