A method to study single-molecule reactions confined in a biomimetic container is described. The technique combines rapid vesicle preparation, optical trapping and fluorescence confocal microscopy for performing simultaneous single-vesicle trapping and single-molecule detection experiments. The collisional environment between a single enzyme and substrate inside a vesicle is characterized by a Brownian dynamics Monte Carlo simulation. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.