Isotopic effect on dioctanoyl-phosphatidyl-choline/water system

Dioctanoylphosphatidylcholine (diC8-PC) forms micellar dispersions in water. At a certain lowconcentration range the solution phase separates into two micellar phases below a certain transition temperature To, and the coexistence curve shows an upper consolute temperature Tc at a lecithin molar fraction x,. The phase separation phenomenon can be understood in terms of an adaptation of a thermodynamic model due to Blankschtein, Thurston, and Benedek (BTB). In this paper we report the results of a study of diC8-PC micellar solutions in a solvent consisting of D2O/H2O mixtures. The dicg PC/D20/H20 system shows phase separation with significant variations of Tc and of the critical lipid molar fraction xc, depending on the relative amount of D20. This indicates that an increasing fraction of D2O in the solvent primarily affects the system by modifying lipid-water interactions in such a way that the effective monomer-monomer interaction increases.