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Liquid crystal research highlights

Active nematics exhibit a wealth of interesting behaviour not observed in their ‘inactive’ counterparts. Now Keber and colleagues investigate the properties of active nematic films within a lipid vesicle [1]. The authors created their active nematics by encapsulating microtubules, kinesin motor clusters, and a nonadsorbing polymer within a lipid vesicle and imaged them using confocal microscopy. It was found that, whereas the stable configuration of such defects in an inactive system is typically four +1/2 defects arranged tetrahedrally, the four defects in an active system can oscillate between a tetrahedral and a co-planar configuration and, further, that such defect motion can drastically affect the shape of the vesicles.