Related papers: Exploiting Receptors Competition to Enhance Nanopa…
From viruses to nanoparticles, constructs functionalized with multiple ligands display peculiar binding properties that only arise from multivalent effects. Using statistical mechanical modelling, we describe here how multivalency can be…
Multivalent particles have the ability to form multiple bonds to a substrate. Hence, a multivalent interaction can be strong, even if the individual bonds are weak. However, much more interestingly, multivalency greatly increases the…
Multivalency is prevalent in various biological systems and applications due to the superselectivity that arises from the cooperativity of multivalent binding. Traditionally, it was thought that weaker individual binding would improve the…
Multivalent particles, i.e. microscopic constructs having multiple ligands, can be used to target surfaces selectively depending on their receptor density. Typically, there is a sharp onset of multivalent binding as the receptor density…
Nanoparticles with multiple ligands have been proposed for use in nanomedicine. The multiple targeting ligands on each nanoparticle can bind to several locations on a cell surface facilitating both drug targeting and uptake. Experiments…
Multivalent particles bind to targets via many independent ligand-receptor bonding interactions. This microscopic design spans length scales in both synthetic and biological systems. Classic examples include interactions between cells,…
Multivalent particles competing for binding on the same surface can exhibit switch-like behaviour, depending on the concentration of receptors on the surface. When the receptor concentration is low, energy dominates the free energy of…
Selective targeting of membranes with a specific receptor profile is an ongoing challenge in targeted drug delivery. We investigate the adsorption of copolymers on a multicomponent receptor-covered surface using grand-canonical Monte Carlo…
Weak multivalent interactions govern a large variety of biological processes like cell-cell adhesion and virus-host interactions. These systems distinguish sharply between surfaces based on receptor density, known as superselectivity.…
We utilize a multiscale modeling framework to study the effect of shape, size and ligand composition on the efficacy of binding of a ligand-coated-particle to a substrate functionalized with the target receptors. First, we show how…
Molecular communication (MC), a biologically inspired technology, enables applications in nanonetworks and the Internet of Everything (IoE), with great potential for intra-body systems such as drug delivery, health monitoring, and disease…
To perform recognition, molecules must locate and specifically bind their targets within a noisy biochemical environment with many look-alikes. Molecular recognition processes, especially the induced-fit mechanism, are known to involve…
Nanoparticle gels have attracted considerable attention due to their highly tunable properties. One strategy for producing nanoparticle gels involves using strong local attractions between polymeric molecules, such as DNA hybridization or…
Theoretical studies of self-assembly processes and condensed phases in colloidal systems are often based on effective inter-particle potentials. Here we show that developing an effective potential for particles interacting with a limited…
Cells often have tens of thousands of receptors, even though only a few activated receptors can trigger full cellular responses. Reasons for the overabundance of receptors remain unclear. We suggest that, in certain conditions, the large…
Multivalent binding employs multiple simultaneous supramolecular interactions, increasing avidity and selectivity compared with monovalent binding. While equilibrium aspects of multivalency are well characterized, non-equilibrium behavior…
Reliably distinguishing between cells based on minute differences in receptor density is crucial for cell-cell or virus-cell recognition, the initiation of signal transduction and selective targeting in directed drug delivery. Such sharp…
The formation and dissociation of specific noncovalent interactions between a variety of macromolecules play a crucial role in the function of biological systems. During the last few years, three main lines of research led to a dramatic…
Proteins need to selectively interact with specific targets among a multitude of similar molecules in the cell. But despite a firm physical understanding of binding interactions, we lack a general theory of how proteins evolve high…
Molecular Communications (MC) is a bio-inspired communication technique that uses molecules to transfer information among bio-nano devices. In this paper, we focus on the detection problem for biological MC receivers employing ligand…