A Hierarchical Assembly Process to Engineer a Hydrophobic Core for Virus-like Particles

摘要

Modern gene- and drug-delivery vehicles are evolving into elaborate machines with multiple targeting moieties and efficient cargo-loading capacities. These functionalities need to be localized such that the targeting motifs are on the exterior with high surface accessibility whereas the cargo is protected in the interior. To address this need for incorporating a variety of functionalities with spatial selectivity, multivalent protein assemblies, viruses, and virus-like particles (VLPs) have recently been considered as ideal scaffolds. The advantages of viral systems include simple production, uniform size and structure, and a surface, which molecular cloning and protein-conjugation strategies, can display a variety of functional groups with molecular precision. In the past decade, myriad viruses and VLPs have been genetically and chemically reprogrammed to function as drug/gene-delivery vehicles, vaccine carriers, imaging probes, and composite materials.