The latest achievement of Wang Huaimin's team from Westlake University appeared on the cover of Nano Letters to control the dynamics of polypeptide assembly and cause a "butterfly effect" in cells

Recently, Huaimin Wang's team from the Department of Chemistry of West Lake University and Feihe Huang's team from the Department of Chemistry of Zhejiang University jointly published a research paper entitled "Controlling Intracellular Enzymatic Self-Assembly of Peptide by Host-Guest Complexation for Programming Cancer Cell Death" in Nano Letters

Cancer is one of the major public health problems in the world.

The research group of Wang Huaimin from West Lake University has been conducting research in the field of peptide assembly for many years, and Professor Huang Feihe from Zhejiang University has long been engaged in the study of host-guest interaction

As shown in the figure below, through rational design, the research team synthesized a polypeptide molecule Fc-TPP1 that targets tumor cell mitochondria.

Figure 2.

First, the authors verified the host-guest interaction between Fc-TPP1 and WP6 in vitro, and determined that the binding constant between Fc-TPP1 and WP6 was 39.

The Fc-TPP1/WP6 complex and Fc-TPP1 were co-incubated with ALP-overexpressing human osteosarcoma cells (Saos-2) and cervical cancer cells (HeLa), respectively.

Figure 3.

This work proposes to regulate the assembly behavior of polypeptide molecules in cells by controlling the kinetics of intracellular enzymatic assembly, and precisely control the enzymatic self-assembly behavior of "slow" and "slow" on the cell membrane surface and mitochondria of tumor cells, respectively.

Paper information

Controlling Intracellular Enzymatic Self-Assembly of Peptide by Host-Guest Complexation for Programming Cancer Cell Death?

Xuejiao Yang, Bihan Wu, Jiong Zhou, Honglei Lu, Hongyue Zhang, Feihe Huang, and Huaimin Wang*

Nano Letters

https://doi.

Introduction to Smart Biomaterials Laboratory