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Development of well-defined inorganic and polymeric nanostructures for bio-nanoengineering
Zheng, Wan
Zheng, Wan
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2015
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2016-06-01
Abstract
Bio-nanoengineering, as one of the most fascinating branches of nanoengineering, adapts bio-mimetic, bio-inspired, and bio-hybrid approaches to solve problems in diverse fields of nanoengineering. We study the bio-nanoengineering approaches on four different materials design projects in this thesis, i.e. nanoparticle assembly, polymeric antibiotic design, development of robust polymeric membranes to support membrane protein(MP) functions, and the development of stimuli-responsive nanocarriers for drug delivery. We identified a bio-inspired strategy that uses highly specific "click" reaction pairs reminiscent to DNA base-pairing or antigen-antibody interactions in biology to directly assemble nanoparticles into well-defined colloidal "molecular" architectures. Inspired by the structural features of bacterial- invading viruses that kill specific bacterial strains with high potency, we developed a bio-mimetic approach to discover a family of novel and highly efficient polymeric antibiotics that show double selectivity. To exploit MPs as biologically-derived high-performance nanomaterials in engineered systems, we created robust and scalable amphiphilic-block-copolymer-based nanomembranes that mimic lipid bilayers to support MP functions, and developed novel polymersome membranes with switchable surface charge states to study the membrane-dependent, MP-mediated transport and recognition performance. Finally, we performed proof-of-concept study on a stimuli-responsive nanocarrier design that integrates biocompatible and biodegradable chitosan with mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) via a pH-responsive Schiff base bond for the controlled delivery of pharmaceutical payloads.
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