Thermosensitive Vesicles from Chemically Encoded Lipid‐Grafted Elastin‐like Polypeptides

Abstract

Biomimetic design to afford smart functional biomaterials with exquisite properties represents synthetic challenges and provides unique perspectives. In this context, elastin‐like polypeptides (ELPs) recently became highly attractive building blocks in the development of lipoprotein‐based membranes. In addition to the bioengineered post‐translational modifications of genetically encoded recombinant ELPs developed so far, we report here a simple and versatile method to design biohybrid brush‐like lipid‐grafted‐ELPs using chemical post‐modification reactions. We have explored a combination of methionine alkylation and click chemistry to create a new class of hybrid lipoprotein mimics. Our design allowed the formation of biomimetic vesicles with controlled permeability, correlated to the temperature‐responsiveness of ELPs.

Micelles Formed by an AB Copolymer with Bottlebrush Blocks: Scaling Theory

“…In this case, the diagram contains a number of additional regimes (ST 1 , ST 2 , CC A 1 , CC A 2 , CC A,B ) that are not present in Figure 6. Dashed lines in regimes ST 2 and ST B indicate the approach to full stretching of the backbones in corona blocks, H = aM A (eqs 43 and 49), which happens when micelles are still starlike. In these regimes, A blocks in the coronae of micelles are laterally compressed.…”

“…Comparison of δF B to the conformation free energy per chain, 2 indicates that δF B ≫ F, and therefore, aggregation number Q varies according to a different power law dependence at M B ≤ M B *.…”

“…The self-assembly of block copolymers with various architectures of the blocks remains the focus of research for a number of decades. Interest in these systems is dictated by potential and emerging applications in nanomedicine as drug carriers, biomimetic design, tissue engineering, etc. Self-assembling spherical micelles formed by AB and ABA block copolymers have been extensively studied experimentally (see, e.g., refs − ) and theoretically (see, e.g., ref ).…”

Heterogeneous Synthetic Vesicles toward Artificial Cells: Engineering Structure and Composition of Membranes for Multimodal Functionalities

“…Moreover, thermosensitive vesicles made of lipidconjugated ELPs using click chemistry have been reported by Ibrahimova et al as a new artificial model of hybrid lipoprotein vesicle membranes. 68 However, to our best knowledge to date, there are only a few reports of utilizing polypeptide-or protein-based vesicle platforms to mimic cell-like functions toward artificial cell development. The future direction in utilizing protein-incorporating, heterogeneous synthetic vesicles through hybridization for artificial cell applications will be discussed in more detail in Section 4.…”

“…The authors demonstrated the vesicle assembly of recombinant fusion proteins by hybridization with lipids. Moreover, thermosensitive vesicles made of lipid-conjugated ELPs using click chemistry have been reported by Ibrahimova et al as a new artificial model of hybrid lipo-protein vesicle membranes . However, to our best knowledge to date, there are only a few reports of utilizing polypeptide- or protein-based vesicle platforms to mimic cell-like functions toward artificial cell development.…”