Nanocharacterization of Lyotropic Liquid Crystalline Systems - Self-Assembled Supramolecular Architectures: Lyotropic Liquid Crystals - page 114

m cube formed by coating a large cubosome with silica sol,
evaporating the water to consolidate the silica, and dissolving the cubosome
using an organic solvent (Spicer, 2005b ).
Analagous to cryo-TEM, cryo-FESEM is a high-resolution SEM technique
capable of visualizing the surface morphology of vitreous frozen surfactant
mesophases at nanometer resolution.
Recently, Boyd and co-workers (Boyd et al., 2007; Rizwan et al., 2007)
have used the cryo-FESEM technique to directly investigate the 3D morphol-
ogy and surface structures of dispersed cubosome and hexosome particles.
They found that the 3D cubosome structure enclosing aqueous water channels
agreed well with earlier mathematical models. Both cryo-TEM and cryo-
FESEM images displayed cubic morphology with coexisting vesicular
structures (Fig. 4.13 ).

image of a 100- μ

(a) (b)

300 nm

(c) (d)

100 nm

Figure 4.13 Images of phytantriol-based cubosomes and hexosomes obtained using
cryo-TEM [(a) and (b)] and cryo-FESEM images [(c) and (d)]. The smaller white
particles coexisting with cubosomes in the cryo-FESEM image were thought to be
stabilizer (Pluronic F127) particles (Boyd et al., 2007).