State Key Laboratory of Oncogenes and Related Genes, Center for Single-Cell Omics, School of Public Health, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200025, China.
School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Frontiers Science Center for Transformative Molecules and National Center for Translational Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China.
Adv Mater. 2022 Sep;34(37):e2201562. doi: 10.1002/adma.202201562. Epub 2022 Aug 10.
Proteins are essential elements for almost all life activities. The emergence of nanotechnology offers innovative strategies to create a diversity of nanoparticles (NPs) with intrinsic capacities of mimicking the functions of proteins. These artificial mimics are produced in a cost-efficient and controllable manner, with their protein-mimicking performances comparable or superior to those of natural proteins. Moreover, they can be endowed with additional functionalities that are absent in natural proteins, such as cargo loading, active targeting, membrane penetrating, and multistimuli responding. Therefore, protein-mimicking NPs have been utilized more and more often in biosystems for a wide range of applications including detection, imaging, diagnosis, and therapy. To highlight recent progress in this broad field, herein, representative protein-mimicking NPs that fall into one of the four distinct categories are summarized: mimics of enzymes (nanozymes), mimics of fluorescent proteins, NPs with high affinity binding to specific proteins or DNA sequences, and mimics of protein scaffolds. This review covers their subclassifications, characteristic features, functioning mechanisms, as well as the extensive exploitation of their great potential for biological and biomedical purposes. Finally, the challenges and prospects in future development of protein-mimicking NPs are discussed.
蛋白质是几乎所有生命活动的基本要素。纳米技术的出现为创造具有内在模拟蛋白质功能能力的各种纳米粒子（NPs）提供了创新策略。这些人工模拟物以具有成本效益和可控的方式生产，其蛋白质模拟性能可与天然蛋白质相媲美或优于天然蛋白质。此外，它们可以具有天然蛋白质所没有的额外功能，例如货物装载、主动靶向、膜穿透和多刺激响应。因此，蛋白质模拟纳米粒子在生物系统中越来越多地用于广泛的应用，包括检测、成像、诊断和治疗。为了突出这一广阔领域的最新进展，本文总结了属于以下四个不同类别的具有代表性的蛋白质模拟纳米粒子：酶的模拟物（纳米酶）、荧光蛋白的模拟物、与特定蛋白质或 DNA 序列具有高亲和力结合的纳米粒子以及蛋白质支架的模拟物。本文综述了它们的分类、特征、作用机制，以及广泛开发其在生物和生物医学方面的巨大潜力。最后，讨论了蛋白质模拟纳米粒子未来发展的挑战和前景。
