Fig. 2.

Controlled and reconfigurable assembly of vesicle networks. a A defined number of vesicles were brought together to assemble 2-D networks of various architectures, including, from left to right, bi-compartment, trigonal, square, pentagonal and branched geometries. b Vesicles were vertically manipulated and deposited enabling 3-D structures to be assembled, including tetrahedral and square-pyramidal geometries. c Three-layered pyramid geometries could also be formed, with the vesicle arrangements shown in schematic on the right. d Optical tweezers were used to reconfigure the networks between several geometries (linear to square to tetrahedral; arrows indicate direction of movement). False colours used to demonstrate that images were taken in different planes and subsequently superimposed. Green channel = lower plane; pink channel = upper plane. Scale bar = 10 µm for all images. NaCl concentration = 0.75 M