Séminaire du Dr. Renko De Vries
Associate Professor, Wageningen University Laboratory of Physical Chemistry and Colloid Science
Vendredi 24 octobre à 10h30, Salle Dussane, ENS, 45 rue d’Ulm
A minimalistic artificial viral coat protein
The concept of « artificial viruses » is very popular in the field of the delivery of nucleic acids. However, in practice only modified natural viruses appear to work well and synthetic delivery vehicles do not. While the synthetic delivery vehicles are sometimes called artificial viruses, their shape and self-assembly has very little in common with natural viruses….We have designed a minimalistic artificial capsid protein consisting of three distinct polypeptide blocks that each encode a crucial physico-chemical interaction for virus assembly: 1) a cationic block for nucleic acid binding 2) a silk-like block that gives rise to protein-protein interactions and hence cooperativity of self-assembly, and 3) a steric block that regulates interactions of the artifical virus with the outside world. As we will show these minimalistic capid proteins mimick in many ways the capsid proteins of TMV: when mixed with DNA, we observe the spontaneo
us and
highly cooperative formation of rod-like particles, each encapsulating a single DNA molecule that are also transfective.
A Hernandez-Garcia et al., Design and self-assembly of simple coat proteins for artificial viruses, Nature Nanotechnology 9 (9), 698-702.