Light-Actuated Shapeshifting Vesicles Without Photoswitches

Light offers spatiotemporal control over matter, but manipulating membrane curvature typically relies on embedded photoswitches or covalent bilayer modification.Here we show that encapsulated small molecules, including standard fluorophores and the metabolite NADH, enable rapid, reversible switching of vesicle curvature under illumination, without the need for altered membrane composition.Phospholipid and fatty-acid vesicles repeatedly transition between positive and negative curvature, and the direction of switching are dictated by the identity of the encapsulated solute and buffer.These observations indicate that illumination perturbs solute-membrane interactions, establishing a light-maintained curvature minimum.This behaviour reflects a chemically mediated, dissipative mechanism that operates across distinct membrane types and chemically diverse solutes.By establishing a general, photoswitch-free route to optical control of membrane shape, this work provides a minimal strategy for actuating synthetic cells and suggests 1 that naturally occurring metabolites may have enabled light-responsive dynamics in primitive protocells.