The fluorescence of Nile red in LNC-loaded gels was followed up to 1 month afterdispersion in the gel to study the stability of encapsulation. A LabRAM laser scanningconfocal microspectrometer (Horiba SA, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France) was used in thisexperiment. Samples of 500 mg of gel were scanned with the 488 nm line of an Ar+laser (laser power at the sample was ca. 170 μW) under a 10× microscope objective(Olympus, Japan), with a confocal hole opened to a diameter of 1000 μm, in order toobtain a statistically averaged analysis of a large sample volume. Acquisition and dataanalysis were carried out with LabSpec 4.18 software (Horiba SA, France). Theposition of the center of mass of the fluorescence spectra was calculated as follows: =( ). ( )( )ii iCM IInmλλ λλwhere I(λi) is the fluorescence intensity at emission wavelength