Construction of a Pulsed-Magnetic System for On-Site Use: Application to Liposomes for Biological Membrane Modeling

We constructed a pulsed-magnetic system to be able to apply high magnetic fields for experimental studies in chemistry and biology. Operated by a pulsed current derived from a small-sized capacitor bank to a coil-bore wound copper wire, the maximum pulsed fields of more than 20 T and the pulsewidth of similar to 3 ms are generated from a charging energy of 2.4 kJ (700 V and 10 mF). With a large room-temperature bore of 8 mm, we are able to examine from the dynamic light scattering changes in liposome of dipalmitoylphosphocholine employed as a biological membrane model, which are distorted by applied pulsed fields over a 5 min interval and divide through the induced magnetic orientation. These changes were confirmed by comparing the results of pulsed fields against those of zero fields. This result agrees with the studies involving static fields that have been used to explain the division induced by magnetic orientation. Despite the pulse field having an extremely short duration, this system yields the changes effective in liposome necessary for modeling the biological behavior under strong magnetic fields.