Pulsatile lipid vesicles under osmotic stress

The response of lipid bilayers to osmotic stress is an important part of cellular function. Previously, in (Oglecka et al., 2014), we reported that cell-sized giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) exposed to hypotonic media, respond to the osmotic assault by undergoing a cyclical sequence of swelling and bursting events, coupled to the membranes compositional degrees of freedom. Here, we seek to deepen our quantitative understanding of the essential pulsatile behavior of GUVs under hypotonic conditions, by advancing a comprehensive theoretical model for vesicle dynamics. The model quantitatively captures our experimentally measured swell-burst parameters for single-component GUVs, and reveals th