Soft materials as biological and artificial membranes

Abstract

This review focuses on soft materials involved in biological and artificial membranes. The illustration is a conceptual scheme of artificial membranes synthesized by human-made hydrophilic and hydrophobic soft materials.

Nanoparticles for oral delivery: targeted therapy for inflammatory bowel disease

“…Intestinal stem cells (ISCs) have an intrinsic advantage of complex structures and organization of clusters of cells called organoids when placed in Matrigel. 209 Meanwhile, the organoids can mimic regular epithelial epithelium by having all of the differentiated and undifferentiated epithelium cells, such as goblet cells, Paneth cells, and enteroendocrine cells. 210 Therefore, this makes the ISCs and organoids a reliable model to accurately study the pathophysiology of IBD and effectively evaluate the benefits of colon-targeted NDDSs for IBD treatment.…”

Role of polyplex charge density in lipopolyplexes

“…One limitation of this study is that we built simplified and idealized polyplex models with fixed size, while the polyplex particles fabricated in experiment have different sizes and surface roughnesses. 33,34 The systematic investigation of the complicated effects associated with polyplex sizes and surface properties is beyond the scope of the current study.…”

Angstrom-scale ion channels towards single-ion selectivity

“…Inspired by intelligent biological ion channels, the synthesis of artificial ion channels with smart ion-selective functions comparable to those observed in natural ion channels has attracted extensive research interests in the last four decades. Since the first synthetic ion channel was fabricated by assembling a cyclodextrin derivative in liposome reported in 1982, 30 a series of self-assembled ion channels [31][32][33][34] have been manufactured by the precise assembly of supramolecules including cyclodextrins, crown ethers, and polypeptides into lipid bilayer membranes. Synthetic supramolecular ion channels 32,33,[35][36][37][38][39] have pore sizes and dimensions analogous to biological ion channels 29,40 because both artificial supramolecular ion channels and natural ion channels are assembled based on lipid bilayer technologies.…”