Following their extraction by aqueous media, oil
bodies in the resulting dispersion appear to be spherical. In their
natural cell environment they obtain a polygonal shape due to
surface stresses developing as a result of intimate contact with
other organelles (Nikiforidis, Kiosseoglou, & Scholten, 2013).
However, in spite of this, oil bodies tend to retain their integrity and
do not coalesce into larger ones due to the presence at their surface
of an elastic, mixed protein-phospholipids membrane which endows
them with considerable electrostatic and steric stability
(Huang, 1994).