Journal
SOFT MATTER
Volume 7, Issue 19, Pages 9104-9112Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c1sm05398a
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [20736005, 20876004]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The cytotoxicity of nanoparticles (NPs) and their potential applications in drug delivery and intracellular imaging have been extensively investigated, and a thorough molecular understanding of how cellular membrane responds to the introduction of NPs is essential for biomaterial design. In this work, N-varied dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) simulation is applied to investigate how a membrane responds to adsorption of ligand-coated NP. Depending on the membrane surface tension, ligand area density and NP size, four kinds of membrane responses are observed: membrane rupture, NP adhesion, NP penetration, and receptor-mediated endocytosis. While endocytosis provides an effective pathway for cellular uptake of NPs, the NP penetration and NP-induced membrane rupture are related to cytotoxicity. These results support the recent experimental reports that NPs have a Janus face for their biomedical applications: serving as carriers for the transmembrane transport of drug and causing cytotoxicity.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available