New Amphiphilic Dendrimers for Encapsulation and Release

蛋白质是自然界的大分子，在对特定刺激的反应中，蛋白质的组装和拆卸在生物学中无处不在。模拟这些过程，其中蛋白质被用作分解人工大分子组装的刺激，对于各种生物医学应用都很有趣。例如，虽然靶向药物递送不是本提案的具体目标，但本文提出的获得概念验证的实验可能会对该领域产生重大影响。具体来说，本提案描述了使用蛋白质作为刺激来分解基于树突的两亲性组件的通用策略的发展。我们最近在文献中报道的表面两亲性树状大分子是一类独特的分子，因为它们是唯一一类通过聚集形成胶束型组装的两亲性树状大分子。更有趣的是，这些组合可以在刺激下分解。虽然刺激反应组装本身已经被广泛地研究过，但关于蛋白质被用作分解有组织的超分子组装的刺激的报道相当有限。这一提议描述了一种解决这一问题的协调方法，这可能在生物学和医学上有广泛的影响。

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.