A figure from Atul Parikh’s article, “Long-range interlayer alignment of intralayer domains in stacked lipid bilayers,” was chosen as the cover image for the December, 2012 issue of “Nature Materials”. The article shows that stacked bilayers can exhibit columnar alignment of phase-separated domains that propagates across hundreds of layers. The serial coupling of functionality that may result from such a long-range arrangement should lead to new applications in photonics and sensing.

Download the article here: http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat3451.html

A summary of the article is in the “News and Views” section, here: http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v11/n12/full/nmat3507.html