Design a protein gripper to capture a hydrophobic cargo

In recent years, the employment of nano-robots in intelligent transferring of nano-cargos and medical treatments has been in the spotlight of researchers. The first step is to present appropriate environmental nano-parts with the potential ability to transform into nano-robots. prefoldin, which is a molecular chaperone, is introduced as a new protein nano-actuator being capable of capturing nano-cargos with different charges and various sizes, which can also be used in medical applications. By the aid of mutation, in this work authors have designed a new prefoldin nano-actuator in order to capture hydrophobic nano-cargo, meaning that the hydrophobic amino acids in the nano-actuator have substituted hydrophilic amino acids. Then, the interaction between the mutated nano-actuator and the desired cargo was investigated through the all-atom molecular dynamics simulations in an explicit solvent environment and at 310 K temperature. The designed nano-actuator managed to attach to the cargo with four tentacles out of six possible tentacles by leveraging the available attraction between hydrophobic amino acids. Given the results obtained from this research, it can be percieved that the designed prefoldin nano-actuator can serve as a potential factor in transferring the hydrophobic cargos and inhibiting the pathogenic factors.
Source: IET Nanobiotechnology - Category: Nanotechnology Source Type: research