The renewed and increasing interest in lipid self-assembly, phase behaviour and interfacial properties can be related to both a much improved insight in biological systems and the applications of lipids in food and pharmaceutical industry; in the latter, the development of drug delivery systems based on lipids has become in focus. Amphiphilic systems comprise lipids, surfactants as well as different types of polymers, including block and graft copolymers. Research on biological amphiphiles has often been conducted separate from research on synthetic ones. However, in recent years a very fruitful convergence between the two fields has evolved. These new perspectives on fundamental research and applications of lipids are discussed in these proceedings from an international symposium on "Lipid and Polymer Lipid-systems", October 2000 in Chia Laguna in Italy - a joint undertaking of Prof. Maura Monduzzi at Cagliari University, Italy and Camurus Lipid Research Foundation, Lund, Sweden.

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Inhalt
Physical chemistry: The loss of certainty.- Polymer-surfactant association as seen by fluorescence.- Restricted diffusion: An effective tool to investigate food emulsions.- The alveolar surface is lined by a coherent liquid-crystalline phase.- Steric stabilization of liposomes a review.- Acyl migration and hydrolysis in monoolein-based systems.- A NMR self-diffusion study of the porous structure of starch granules.- DNAlipid systems. An amphiphile self-assembly and polymer-surfactant perspective.- Supramolecular structures formed by phospholiponucleosides: Aggregational properties and molecular recognition.- From bilayers to micelles in a dilute surfactant system: A phase with a perforated bilayer network.- Effect of a bile salt on the aggregation behavior of a double-chained cationic surfactant - the cationic-rich dilute region of the didodecyldimethylammonium bromide-sodium taurodeoxycholate-water system.- Hydrolysis of the cubic liquid-crystalline phase of glyceryl monooleate by human pancreatic lipases.