Virus-like particles with tunable morphology derived from amphiphilic polyplexes

ABSTRACT

Virus-like particles are a significant class of biomaterials composed of coat polymers and DNA that assemble into different shapes with a variety of sizes from tens to hundreds of nanometers. In this work, a novel system of virus-like hierarchical nanostructures has been developed by the combination of poly(ethylene glycol)-poly(_L-lysine) block copolymers with the poly(benzyl ether) dendron-DNA hybrids. Because of the unique topological structure of polyelectrolytes, the dimension of assemblies could be switched from 1D nanorods to 2D nanosheets to 3D vesicles via varying the molar ratio of two components. Morphologies of the vesicles were characterized by transmission electron microscopy.

KEYWORDS:

• Dendrimers
• DNA
• nanoparticles
• polypeptides
• self-assembly

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Prof. Zhibo Li, Prof. Qinghua Fan of Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. Dongsheng Liu of Tsinghua University for the helpful discussion.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.21404062), Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (No.2015M581966), Natural Science Foundation of Ningbo (No.2015A610241 and 2016A610109) and K. C. Wong Magna Fund in Ningbo University.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.21404062), Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (No.2015M581966), Natural Science Foundation of Ningbo (No.2015A610241 and 2016A610109) and K. C. Wong Magna Fund in Ningbo University.