Watching micelles fuse in real time

Micelles—soft nanospheres of assembled surfactant molecules—have shown promise as vehicles for drug delivery. But what we know about how micelles form and grow comes from static images or from light-scattering methods, which don’t observe the process directly. Now, an international team led by Nathan Gianneschi of Northwestern University demonstrates that liquid-cell transmission electron microscopy can directly image the motion of micelles at the nanoscale (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2017, DOI: 10.1021/jacs.7b09060). Watch this video to see how micelles in solution interact, morph, and grow.