The recent success of messenger RNA (mRNA) nanoparticles for vaccination against Covid-19 has highlighted the great potential of nanoparticulate pharmaceutical products for application in a wide variety of indications, including cancer.
Nanoparticles can be formed from different materials, including lipids (liposomes, lipid nanoparticles) polymers, as well as inorganic materials or hybrid...
In the recent years, plant extract became more and more used, worldwide in allopathic treatment of different types of disease associated symptoms. Several studies showed that plant extracts containing a certain alkaloid, known as berberine, has different beneficial effects such as antitumoral effect (Andreicuț et all, 2019; Milata et all, 2019). Other effect of these berberine based plant...
The outermost layer of mammalian skin, called the stratum corneum (SC), constitutes a self-healing barrier against moisture loss and ingress of foreign substances. The SC comprises flat "bricks" (50-100 micron wide and 1 micron thick corneocytes largely filled with keratins) held together by a `mortar' of 6-10 layers of lipids (100 nm thick). The corneocytes are hydrophilic, while the lipid...
Protein ligand interactions play an important role in biology and in order to influence this process in a targeted way increased understanding is necessary. The binding process is heavily influenced by its thermodynamic parameters. While the overall change in enthalpy can be easily measured using isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) and the change in entropy and Gibbs free enthalpy then...
Hydrogel films made from responsive polymers are able to switch between a swollen (extended polymer chains) and a contracted film state (coiled polymer chains) in response to slight changes in their surroundings. In recent studies, we demonstrated the versatility of a multi-responsive diblock copolymer, containing a zwitterionic poly(sulfobetaine) and a nonionic poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide)...
Single chain nanoparticles (SCNPs) are unimolecular polymer chains folded or collapsed via intra-molecular cross-linking under high dilution, leading to sparse conformations and a topological polydispersity similar to that of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). Currently, there is great interest in expanding this technology to biodegradable and biocompatible polymers, including proteins....
This contribution introduces the newly established sample environment at the small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) diffractometer KWS-2 at the neutron source Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (MLZ, Garching, Germany): the in-situ size exclusion chromatography (SEC) directly followed by SANS measurements, the SEC-SANS setup. The motivation is the growing demand from users interested in bio-molecular samples...
The neutron backscattering spectrometer SPHERES (SPectrometer for High Energy RESolution) at MLZ is a third generation backscattering spectrometer with focusing optics and phase-space transform (PST) chopper. It covers a dynamic range of ± 31μeV with a high resolution of about 0.66μeV and a good signal-to-noise ratio. The instrument performance has been improved over the recent years by...
Milk proteins exhibit wide diversity of physicochemical properties which make them attractive for many pharmaceutical and food applications. Major milk proteins are β-lactoglobulin, α-lactalbumin, serum albumin, and lactoferrin. Amongst these proteins, lactoferrin and β-lactoglobulin are considered to be the most versatile in terms of physicochemical properties and mainly due to the...
Lower critical solution temperature (LCST) polymers have attracted great interest for 3D bioprinting, as they are water-soluble and form solutions at room temperature, while they form a hydrogel at body temperature [1]. The hydrogel properties depend strongly on the architecture of polymers and their concentration. Poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) based thermoresponsive polymers are particularly...
Nanoparticles are nowadays widely used in biology and have quickly emerged as essential to modern medicine. When nanomaterials come into contact with biological membrane, their interaction with biomacromolacules and biological barriers will determine their bioactivity, biological fate and cytotoxicity. It goes without saying that understanding the interaction between nanomaterial and...
Cellulose is the predominant polymer of the biosphere. An understanding of the interaction of cellulose surfaces with different kinds of adsorbed molecules is key to many fundamental questions in biological, environmental and materials sciences. Unlike other biopolymers, the synthases for cellulose polymerize the monomer (glucose) directly into the nanostructure, unitary crystallites called...
It is known that ionic liquids enhance the exploit of resources from pretreated wood. More cellulose and lignin is made available as valuable chemicals for biodegradable products. We monitored the pretreatment process of beech wood by an ionic liqiud in operando using small angle neutron scattering. In this dynamic process we could identify three stages: (1) the impregnation, i.e. the flooding...
The method of small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) is highly versatile. Using deuteration many hydrogen containing materials can be highlighted against the residual matrix. This is also highly beneficial for biomaterials. Either synthetic polymers or deuterium grown proteins and lipids from bacteria are embedded in highly complex biology mimicking environments such that their specific...
The new customized SAXS/WAXS instrument from XENOCS have be installed in the JCNS SAXS-Lab1 from the end of 2021. As a young member of our small angle scattering instrument by using X-ray as beam, the new instrument is equipped with a high flux metal-jet source and a moveable Eiger 2R4M SAXS detector. With additional 4-axis motorized WAXS detector and Bonse-Hart USAXS the scattering vector q...
Wood is an abundant hierachical biomaterial with a wide variety of current and potential uses. The technological applications of wood range from sustainable building materials to advanced functional nanomaterials made of its smallest building blocks. The wood cell walls consists of well-oriented, elongated structural units from the molecular level to the macroscale, with water being present at...
To elucidate the function of the brain, one needs to understand in detail the structural organization of the connectomes, i.e., the spatial architecture of the nerve fibers in the brain [1]. Various imaging techniques such as diffusion MRI, OCT, 3D PLI, etc., have been extensively used to address this issue [2-4]. Recently, X-ray have been used to study the nerve fibers in a brain slice [5]....
Supramolecular polymers, in which noncovalent interactions, like hydrogen bonds, keep the repeating units together, offer exciting prospects for materials with novel properties because the interactions are reversible. This is the case of diaminotriazine (DAT) and thymine-1-acetic acid (THY) (one of the nucleobases in DNA functional groups) that form heteromolecular interactions, and...
Mucins are an important group of biomacromolecules that function as soft wet barriers to chemical transport and shear stress in the physiological milieu [1]. They are characterized by a charged and highly glycosylated linked peptide backbone and a propensity to form cross-links by a range of mechanisms. The fundamental structural unit is a bottle-brush-like morphology organized into higher...
Abstract. Novel, multifunctional nanoparticles and hydrogels that exhibits a unique set of properties for the effective treatment of cancer are presented. The materials are comprised of polypeptidic and polyethylene oxide polymers that are a non-cytotoxic polymer. The amphiphilic hybrid materials assemble in aqueous media to form micelles or vesicles, comprised of an outer hydrophilic corona...
Protein solution undergoes a re-entrant phase transition from one-phase to two-phase and then back to the one-phase in the presence of tri and tetravalent counterions [1]. Tri and tetravalent (unlike mono and divalent) counterions induce short-range attraction between the protein molecules, leading to the transformation from one-phase to two-phase system. The excess condensation of these...
Proteins play a crucial role in many biological processes. For example, all chemical reactions in living cells are accelerated by many orders of magnitude by enzymes, which are proteins that are responsible for catalyzing selectively one specific chemical reaction. Proton transfer is a fundamental mechanism at the core of many enzyme-catalyzed reactions. That is why the knowledge of...
By utilizing time-of-flight neutron reflectometry (ToF-NR) under different relative humidity, we demonstrate that polymer brushes constituted by hydrophilic cyclic macromolecules exhibit more compact conformation with lower roughness compared to linear brush analogues, due to the absence of dangling chain ends extending at the interface. [1] In addition, due to increased interchain steric...
The self-assembly behavior of amphiphiles in a polar solvent is still considered a hot topic for application strategies. Their organization into nanostructured systems has been extensively applied in bio-nanotechnology for various purposes: either mimicking biological components of lipids and proteins or bio-sensing and controlled release in materials science and drug delivery. However, the...
X-ray and neutron scattering are widely used powerful techniques for probing the physical structure of materials at the molecular and supramolecular scale. With the simultaneous advent of high-speed detectors, previously unimaginable time-resolved in situ and high throughput photon and neutron experiments have become possible, with the subsequent explosion of data volumes. Data analysis is...
Protein-polymer interactions are a key point to understand and improve the activity of proteins and polymer in many bio related applications. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) is a widely used bio compatible polymer with applications reaching from antifouling, over crystallization helper to PEGylation of therapeutic drugs. Neutron scattering is an ideal method to examine protein PEG interactions...
Over the last decades, our understanding of drug loaded micelles was simple. The core dissolves and protects the drugs, the micelle corona ensures stealth properties and ensures colloidal stability. Using a wide variety of analytical tools, including neutron scattering, NMR spectroscopy, synthetic variations and in silico molecular modeling, we have found conclusive evidence that this...
Foams are a complex material with a rich structural hierarchy. Aqueous foams in particular change their structure over time due to processes like gravitational drainage, Ostwald ripening and coalescence. Because of this complex structure, modelling SANS curves obtained from foams is challenging. Here, a newly developed model, describing SANS data of foams, is presented. The model takes into...
The self-assembly of amphiphilic copolymers with alternating hydrophobic and hydrophilic blocks has garnered much attention in recent years due to the wide range of nanostructures they can form, including micelles, vesicles, and gels. In this particular study, we focus on investigating the phase behavior of in-house synthesized Alternating Amphiphilic Copolymers (CnEGm) [1] in water using...
Elastin-like polypeptides (ELPs) are versatile responsive biopolymers used in a range of biomedical applications such as drug delivery, protein purification and tissue engineering in the last decade. ELPs mimic a hydrophobic amino acid repeat segments of elastin which is a key protein of the extracellular matrix, and provides elastic properties to biological tissues – such as lung and...
The use of particles such as nanocelluloses, i.e. cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) and nanofibrils (CNF) received increasing attention for the Pickering stabilization of fluid interfaces [1]. The adsorption of nanocellulose and nanocellulose-protein composites at oil-water or air-water interfaces facilitates the formation of stable and biocompatible emulsions and foams but depends heavily on the...
Magnesium (Mg)-based implants are in the focus for orthopedic applications, due to their biocompatibility and biodegradability. Depending on the alloy, the degradation behavior and integration into the bone will differ. To elucidate this complex interplay which affects all hierarchical levels of bone, synchrotron radiation-based scattering and imaging techniques are used. Specifically, we have...
Cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) are derived from wood and thus renewable biomaterials par excellence. There nanoscale diameter, high aspect ratio, mechanical strength, and flexibility make them ideally suited as nanoscale building blocks for replacing synthetic nanocomposite materials, membranes, and templates for organic electronics and photovoltaics. Being dispersed in water, CNF dispersions...
The fusion of viral and host cell membranes is a pivotal step in the infection and life cycle of any virus. Despite the massive global research interest in SARS-CoV-2 many aspects of the fusion process are still only rudimentarily understood. Biological fusion assays are widely applied to study different steps of viral-host membrane fusion, however, multidisciplinary approaches offer a broader...
The stability of food emulsions depends -beside other effects- on a complex interplay between proteins, phospholipids, oil and water. Preparing milk-based and sustainable plant-based emulsions requires good knowledge in interfacial and emulsion stabilization mechanisms, affected by the emulsion composition. To understand these mechanisms in detail different length scales from interatomic to...
Amyloid β42 (Aβ42) is predominantly found in the form of plaques in the brain tissues and stems the cognitive dysfunctionality in Alzheimer’s. Aβ depending upon aggregation states Aβ42-monomer (M)/β-sheets/oligomer (O)/fibril (F), and amino acid lengths affect the model membrane mimetic systems [1-4]. The plasma membrane is the first biological structure encountered by Aβ42 and can play a...
Small angle neutron scattering (SANS) is a powerful experimental technique for the investigation of soft matter and in particular biomaterials thanks to the high contrast between hydrogenated and deuterated components and its spatial resolving power in the nm scale (1-100 nm). We have used SANS to obtain details on the morphology of biomaterial nanostructures which often form multiple...
Ionic assembly of biopolyelectrolytes with oppositely charged polyelectrolytes or surfactants allows to construct self-assembled colloidal systems, which are very versatile with respect to their structures and properties, such as rheology or solubilisation. This is very important for many practical applications of colloidal formulations, but increasingly requires high biocompatibility of the...
Magnesium (Mg)-based implants are in the focus for orthopedic applications, due to their biocompatibility and biodegradability. Depending on the alloy, the degradation behavior and integration into the bone will differ. To elucidate this complex interplay which affects all hierarchical levels of bone, synchrotron radiation-based scattering and imaging techniques are used. Specifically, we have...
