北京大学定量生物学中心
学术报告
题 目: MD simulations at the material-cell interface: from endosomal escape of nanoparticles to 3D cell spreading in dynamic hydrogels
Associate professor, Department of Physics, Chinese University of Hong Kong
时 间: 5月13日（周一）13:00-14:00
地 点: 吕志和楼B101
主持人: 齐志 研究员
摘要:
The plasma membranes constitute the first barrier against the cellular entrance of nanoparticles (NPs) designed to act as biosensors or drug delivery vehicles. Most NPs cross this barrier through endocytosis, a process during which they are engulfed by the cell and reside in lipid vesicles named endosomes. In the first part of this talk I will discuss our MD simulations and continuum modelling results on how a certain type of NP, namely, nanodiamond, manages to escape from the endosome, a process that is particularly relevant for NPs intended as intracellular sensors and delivery vessels. In the second part of this talk I will discuss our more recent work on dynamic hydrogels used as cell culture medium. Combining MD simulations, free energy and kinetic Monte Carlo calculations, we model the cell-adaptable hydrogel formed by hyaluronic acids grafted with either adamantane or cholic acid via cyclodextrin-based host-guest complexation. Based on these calculations I will discuss the role of host-guest binding kinetics in dictating the timescale of network reorganization in the supramolecular hydrogel and how, by matching this timescale with that of cellular activities, one may design dynamic hydrogels that support efficient 3D cell spreading.
Yi Wang graduated from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with a PhD in Biophysics and Computational Biology in 2008. She then worked as a postdoc at the University of California, San Diego. In 2012 she joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and became an associate professor in 2018. Her research revolves around computer modeling of biological macromolecules and their interactions with the environment. In close collaboration with experimentalists, her group uses molecular dynamics simulation, continuum modeling, and free energy calculation to investigate, for instance, how structure and dynamics of a membrane are affected by its lipid components, how nanoparticles interact with a membrane, and how small molecules diffuse within or across a lipid bilayer.
