Related papers: Exploiting Receptors Competition to Enhance Nanopa…
In color vision, the quantitative rules for mixing lights to make a target color are well understood. By contrast, the rules for mixing odorants to make a target odor remain elusive. A solution to this problem in vision relied on…
Cells need to reliably sense external ligand concentrations to achieve various biological functions such as chemotaxis or signaling. The molecular recognition of ligands by surface receptors is degenerate in many systems leading to…
DNA-mediated multivalent interactions between colloidal particles have been extensively applied for their ability to program bulk phase behaviour and dynamic processes. Exploiting the competition between different types of DNA-DNA bonds,…
Limited bonding valence, usually accompanied by well-defined directional interactions and selective bonding mechanisms, is nowadays considered among the key ingredients to create complex structures with tailored properties: even though…
The structural and chemical properties of metal nanoparticles are often dictated by their interactions with molecular ligand shells. These interactions are highly material-specific and can vary significantly even among elements within the…
Multivalency is a common biological mechanism of formation of strong reversible and selective bonds by grouping weak bonds. Polymers often act as a scaffold to which multiple binding groups are attached. Here I present an analytical theory…
Cells use surface receptors to estimate the concentration of external ligands. Limits on the accuracy of such estimations have been well studied for pairs of ligand and receptor species. However, the environment typically contains many…
Using a statistical mechanical model and numerical simulations, we provide the design principle for the bridging strength ($\xi$) and linker density ($\rho$) dependent superselectivity in linker-mediated multivalent nanoparticle adsorption.…
The dynamics of particles interacting by key-lock binding of attached biomolecules are studied theoretically. Examples of such systems include DNA-functionalized colloids as well as nanoparticles grafted with antibodies to cell membrane…
It has been established that Terahertz (THz) band signals can interact with biomolecules through resonant modes. Specifically, of interest here, protein activation. Our research goal is to show how directing the mechanical signaling inside…
Targeted drug delivery relies on two physical processes: the selective binding of a therapeutic particle to receptors on a specific cell membrane, followed by transport of the particle across the membrane. In this article, we address some…
Intensive concerns about the biosafety of nanomaterials demand the systematic study of the mechanisms about their biological effects. Many biological effects can be attributed to the interaction of nanomaterials with protein and their…
Controlling the transport, trapping, and filtering of nanoparticles is important for many applications. By virtue of their weak response to gravity and their thermal motion, various physical mechanisms can be exploited for such operations…
Ligand coated nanoparticles are complex objects consisting of a metallic or semiconductor core with organic ligands grafted on their surface. These organic ligands provide stability to a nanoparticle suspension. In solutions, the effective…
Specific interactions are a hallmark feature of self-assembly and signal-processing systems in both synthetic and biological settings. Specificity between components may arise from a wide variety of physical and chemical mechanisms in…
Specific interactions between receptors and their target ligands in the presence of non-target ligands are crucial for biological processes such as T cell ligand discrimination. To discriminate between the target and non-target ligands,…
Often a screening or selection experiment targets a cell or tissue, which presents many possible molecular targets and identifies a correspondingly large number of ligands. We describe a statistical method to extract an estimate of the…
Carefully designed nanostructures can inspire new type of optomechanical interactions and allow surpassing limitations set by classical diffractive optical elements. Apart from strong near-field localization, nanostructured environment…
Molecular Communications (MC) uses molecules as information carriers between nanomachines. MC channel in practice can be crowded with different types of molecules, i.e., ligands, which can have similar binding properties causing severe…
We devise an approach for targeted molecular design, a problem of interest in computational drug discovery: given a target protein site, we wish to generate a chemical with both high binding affinity to the target and satisfactory…