报告摘要：One of the key challenges in biomedicine and nanoscience is to design ligand-coated carriers that can bind selectively to surfaces that display the cognate receptors either above a threshold concentration or in a specific geometric arrangement. Such carriers would enable selective targeting, which is crucial in biomedical applications such as drug delivery. Similarly, many biological processes rely on chemical activation based on molecular or macromolecular recognition. In recent years, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that "super selectivity" can be achieved with nanoparticles that can form multiple weak reversible bonds to a large number of ligands simultaneously. In such systems, the fraction of bound particles varies sharply with the receptor concentration and nanoparticles can be designed such that they approach the on-off binding behavior ideal for receptor-concentration selective targeting. I will discuss our recent work on cell targeting, molecular recognition in polymer networks, and immune system activation by DNA-peptide complexes recruiting TLR9 receptors.
