Supported lipid bilayers (SLBs) are commonly used to investigate the structure and dynamics of biological membranes. Vesicle fusion is a widely exploited method to produce SLBs. However, this process becomes less favoured when the vesicles contain complex lipid mixtures, e.g. natural lipid extracts. In these cases, it is often necessary to change experimental parameters, such as temperature, to unphysiological values to trigger the SLB formation. This may induce lipid degradation and is also not compatible with including membrane proteins or other biomolecules into the bilayers. Here, we show that the peptide discs, $~$10 nm discoidal lipid bilayers stabilized in solution by a self-assembled 18A peptide belt, can be used as precursors for SLBs. The characterizations by means of neutron reflectometry and attenuated total reflectance-FTIR spectroscopy show that SLBs were successfully formed both from synthetic lipid mixtures (surface coverage 90–95%) and from natural lipid mixtures (surface coverage $~85\%$). Traces of 18A peptide (below 0.02 M ratio) left at the support surface after the bilayer formation do not affect the SLB structure. Altogether, we demonstrate that peptide disc formation of SLBs is much faster than the SLB formation by vesicle fusion and without the need of altering any experimental variable from physiologically relevant values.

支持的脂质双层（SLB）通常用于研究生物膜的结构和动力学。囊泡融合是生产SLB的一种广泛使用的方法。但是，当囊泡包含复杂的脂质混合物（例如天然脂质提取物）时，此过程将变得不太受欢迎。在这些情况下，通常需要将实验参数（例如温度）更改为非生理值以触发SLB的形成。这可能会导致脂质降解，并且与将膜蛋白或其他生物分子包含到双层中也不相容。在这里，我们显示了肽盘，$〜$通过自组装的18A肽带在溶液中稳定的10 nm盘状脂质双层可以用作SLB的前体。通过中子反射法和衰减全反射-FTIR光谱进行的表征表明，SLB是由合成脂质混合物（表面覆盖率90–95％）和天然脂质混合物（表面覆盖率）成功形成的$〜85％$）。双层形成后留在支持表面的痕量18A肽（低于0.02 M比例）不会影响SLB结构。总之，我们证明了SLBs的肽盘形成比通过囊泡融合形成的SLB快得多，并且不需要从生理学相关值改变任何实验变量。