Optimization of unnatural amino acid incorporation in collagen and the cross-linking through thioether bond / 生物工程学报

The source of recombinant collagen is clean, and it has the advantages of flexible sequence design, high yield and high purity, so it has a wide application prospect as biomaterials in tissue engineering and other fields. However, how to promote the cross-linking of recombinant collagen molecules and make them form a more stable spatial structure is the difficulty to be overcome in the design of recombinant collagen nanomaterials. Unnatural amino acid O-(2-bromoethyl)-tyrosine was incorporated into collagen by two-plasmid expression system. The results showed that high-purity collagen incorporated with unnatural amino acid could be obtained by induction with final concentration of 0.5 mmol/L IPTG and 0.06% arabinose at 25 °C for 24 hours. The intermolecular cross-linking through thioether bond was formed between collagen molecule incorporated with unnatural amino acid and collagen molecule with cysteine mutation in pH 9.0 NH4HCO3 buffer, which formed aggregates with the largest molecular size up to 1 micrometre. The results pave the way for the design of recombinant collagen biomaterials.

Research progress on metabolism and efficacy of small molecular prodrug nanosystems responsive to tumor redox microenvironment / 药学学报

Compared with normal tissues and cells, the tumor microenvironment has significant differences. For example, glutathione-related metabolic enzymes and reactive oxygen species are highly expressed in different subcellular structures, resulting in an unbalanced redox state. Aiming at the specific redox state in tumor tissues and cells, a series of small molecule prodrug self-assembled nanoparticles can be designed and connected by intelligent response linkers including disulfide bonds, sulfide bonds, and selenium bonds, thioketal bonds, etc. The in vitro and in vivo efficiency and metabolic mode of these nanoparticles are related to the type of linker. This review will summarize the tumor redox microenvironment, the design of intelligent responsive small molecule prodrug nanoparticles, and the metabolic pathways of small molecule prodrug nanoparticles with different connecting linkers and their relationship with drug efficacy.