Nanomaterial interactions with biomembranes: Bridging the gap between soft matter models and biological context
Journal article, 2018

Synthetic polymers, nanoparticles, and carbon-based materials have great potential in applications including drug delivery, gene transfection, in vitro and in vivo imaging, and the alteration of biological function. Nature and humans use different design strategies to create nanomaterials: biological objects have emerged from billions of years of evolution and from adaptation to their environment resulting in high levels of structural complexity; in contrast, synthetic nanomaterials result from minimalistic but controlled design options limited by the authors' current understanding of the biological world. This conceptual mismatch makes it challenging to create synthetic nanomaterials that possess desired functions in biological media. In many biologically relevant applications, nanomaterials must enter the cell interior to perform their functions. An essential transport barrier is the cell-protecting plasma membrane and hence the understanding of its interaction with nanomaterials is a fundamental task in biotechnology. The authors present open questions in the field of nanomaterial interactions with biological membranes, including: how physical mechanisms and molecular forces acting at the nanoscale restrict or inspire design options; which levels of complexity to include next in computational and experimental models to describe how nanomaterials cross barriers via passive or active processes; and how the biological media and protein corona interfere with nanomaterial functionality. In this Perspective, the authors address these questions with the aim of offering guidelines for the development of next-generation nanomaterials that function in biological media.

Author

Marco Werner

Rovira i Virgili University

Thorsten Auth

Forschungszentrum Jülich

Paul A. Beales

University of Leeds

Jean Baptiste Fleury

Universität des Saarlandes

Fredrik Höök

Chalmers, Physics, Biological Physics

Holger Kress

University of Bayreuth

Reid C. Van Lehn

University of Wisconsin Madison

Marcus Müller

University of Göttingen

Eugene P. Petrov

Max Planck Society

Lev Sarkisov

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU)

University of Edinburgh

Jens Uwe Sommer

Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research

Vladimir A. Baulin

Rovira i Virgili University

Biointerphases

19348630 (ISSN) 15594106 (eISSN)

Vol. 13 2 028501

Subject Categories

Other Physics Topics

Biophysics

Bioinformatics (Computational Biology)

DOI

10.1116/1.5022145

PubMed

29614862

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 9