Dhara Palash, Shah Niyati, Sundaram Vidya, Srivastava Ashutosh, Solovev Alexander A, Mei Yongfeng, Gorin Dmitry A, Dey Krishna Kanti
Laboratory of Soft and Living Materials, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Palaj, Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382055, India.
Department of Biological Sciences and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Palaj, Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382055, India.
iScience. 2024 Feb 21;27(3):109286. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.109286. eCollection 2024 Mar 15.
Protein-coated microbubbles have become one of the emerging platforms in biomedical research as theranostic agents. In recent years, microbubbles have been extensively used as ultrasound contrast agents and carriers of molecular cargoes, pertaining to which several studies have focused on tuning the properties of these bubbles to achieve a higher degree of biocompatibility and extended stability. Synthesis of microbubbles has so far been traditionally carried out with pre-heated proteins like bovine serum albumin (BSA) as shell coatings, owing to the ease in making BSA crosslinked structures through disulfide bridge formation. We, however, have performed experiments to demonstrate that air core microbubbles formed with native BSA are more stable compared with those formed using denatured BSA. The experimental observations have been supported with analytical modeling and computational studies, which offer insights into the effect of BSA conformation in stabilizing the microbubbles shells and prolonging their lifetimes.
蛋白质包被的微泡作为治疗诊断剂已成为生物医学研究中新兴的平台之一。近年来，微泡已被广泛用作超声造影剂和分子载体，针对此，多项研究致力于调整这些微泡的性质，以实现更高程度的生物相容性和更长的稳定性。迄今为止，微泡的合成传统上是使用预热的蛋白质（如牛血清白蛋白，BSA）作为壳涂层来进行的，这是因为通过二硫键形成来制备BSA交联结构较为容易。然而，我们进行了实验以证明，与使用变性BSA形成的微泡相比，由天然BSA形成的空芯微泡更稳定。这些实验观察结果得到了分析建模和计算研究的支持，这些研究为BSA构象在稳定微泡壳和延长其寿命方面的作用提供了见解。
