Supramolecular Peptide Amphiphile Vesicles through Host-Guest Complexation

摘要

Single-tail peptide amphiphiles, have been explored as a new class of biomaterials in many fields including nanotechnology and tissue engineering. A typical peptide amphiphile molecule is linked through a covalent amide bond between a hydrophilic peptide sequence and a hydrophobic lipid of variable length. In an aqueous environment, these peptide amphiphiles undergo self-assembly into structures such as vesicles, both spherical and cylindrical micelles or nanotubes, and have been successfully applied in the biomedical sciences for biomaterial conjugation and as bioactive scaffolds for tissue engineering. Although covalent attachment of two components to form peptide amphiphiles has been extremely successful, the synthetic versatility and the ability to respond to external triggers remains limited. A supramolecular approach to form the peptide amphiphile by connecting two building blocks through a non-covalent interaction would represent a major advance, especially in designing stimuli-responsive systems capable of being targeted by specific triggers.