Scattering under shear: alignment of a disordered bicontinuous mesophase

In this work we demonstrate that the application of shear to a disordered lyoptropic liquid phase formed by a biological lipid, monoolein formed in water and butanediol results in the formation of an aligned lamellar phase. Furthermore we show that if shear is applied to this disordered phase in the presence of additional water, an highly oriented inverse bicontinous cubic phase is created. We suggest that these two phase may have applications as biological models, as templates for nanostructured materials and in improved protein crystallization techniques.