Back

Harnessing Gradients for Self-Assembly of Peptide-Based Nanocapsules: A Pathway to Advanced Drug Delivery Systems

Li, H.; Qian, X.; Mohanram, H.; Han, X.; Qi, H.; Zou, G.; Yuan, F.; Miserez, A. G. T.; Yang, Q.; Liu, T.; Gao, H.; Yu, J.

2023-07-19 bioengineering
10.1101/2023.07.19.549672 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Biological systems often create materials with intricate structures to achieve specialized functions. In comparison, precise control of structures in man-made materials has been challenging. Here, we report a serendipitous discovery of insect cuticle peptides (ICPs) spontaneously forming nanocapsules through a single-step solvent exchange process, where the concentration gradient resulting from mixing of water and aceton drives the localization and self-assembly of the peptides into hollow nanocapsules. The underlying driving force is the intrinsic affinity of the peptides for a particular solvent concentration, while the diffusion of water and acetone creates a gradient interface that triggers peptide localization and self-assembly. This gradient-mediated self-assembly offers a transformative pathway towards next-generation drug delivery systems based on peptide nanocapsules.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.