VESICLE SIZING BY STATIC LIGHT-SCATTERING - A FOURIER COSINE TRANSFORM APPROACH

A Fourier cosine transform method, based on the Rayleigh-Gans-Debye th in-shell approximation, was developed to retrieve vesicle size distrib ution directly from the angular dependence of scattered light intensit y. Its feasibility for real vesicles was partially tested on scatterin g data generated by the exact Mie solutions for isotropic vesicles. Th e noise tolerance of the method in recovering unimodal and biomodal di stributions was studied with the simulated data. Applicability of this approach to vesicles with weak anisotropy was examined using Mie theo ry for anisotropic hollow spheres. A primitive theory about the first four moments of the radius distribution about the origin, excluding th e mean radius, was obtained as an alternative to the direct retrieval of size distributions.