New Amphiphilic Dendrimers for Encapsulation and Release

蛋白质是自然界的大分子，对特定刺激做出反应的组装和分解在生物学中普遍存在。模拟这些过程，其中蛋白质被用作刺激来分解人工大分子组装，在各种生物医学应用中是很有趣的。例如，尽管靶向给药不是这项提议的具体目标，但这里提出的为获得概念验证而进行的实验可能在这一领域产生重大影响。具体地说，这项建议描述了利用蛋白质作为刺激来分解树枝状大分子两亲性组件的通用策略的发展。我们最近在文献中报道的两亲表面树枝状大分子是一类独特的分子，因为这是唯一一类通过聚集形成胶束型组装的两亲性树枝状大分子。更有趣的是，这些组件可以在刺激下分解。虽然对刺激反应组装本身的研究已经相当广泛，但将蛋白质用作分解有组织的超分子组装的刺激的报道却相当有限。这项提议描述了一种协调一致的方法来解决这个问题，这可能会在生物学和医学中产生广泛的影响。

Assembly and disassembly of proteins, nature's macromolecules, in response to a specific stimulus is ubiquitous in biology. Mimicking these processes, where proteins are used as the stimulus to disassemble artificial macromolecular assemblies are interesting for a variety of biomedical applications. For example, although targeted drug delivery is not a specific goal for this proposal, the experiments proposed here to obtain the proof-of-concept could have a significant impact in this area. Specifically, this proposal describes the development of versatile strategies to disassemble dendrimer-based amphiphilic assemblies using proteins as stimuli. Facially amphiphilic dendrimers, reported by us recently in the literature, are a unique class of molecules in that these are the only class of amphiphilic dendrimers that form micelle-type assemblies through aggregation. Even more interesting is the fact that these assemblies can be disassembled in response to a stimulus. While stimuli-responsive assemblies themselves have been studied quite extensively, reports where proteins are used as the stimulus for disassembling organized supramolecular assemblies are rather limited. This proposal describes a concerted approach to this problem, which could have broad implications in biology and medicine.