Lipids and nucleic acids (NAs) can hierarchically self-organize into a variety of nanostructures of increasingly complex geometries such as the 1D lamellar, 2D hexagonal, and 3D bicontinuous cubic phases. The diversity and complexity of those lipid-NA assemblies are interesting from a fundamental perspective as well as being relevant to the performance in gene delivery and gene silencing applications. The finding that not only the chemical make of the lipid-NA constructs, but their actual supramolecular organization, affects their gene transfection and silencing efficiencies has inspired physicists, chemists, and engineers to this field of research. At the moment it remains an open question how exactly the different lipid-NA structures interact with cells and organelles in order to output an optimal response. This article reviews our current understanding of the structures of different lipid-NA complexes and the corresponding cellular interaction mechanisms. The recent advances in designing optimal lipid-based NA carriers will be introduced with an emphasis on the structure-function relations.

中文翻译：

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脂质构建物中核酸的自组织。

脂质和核酸（NA）可以分层自组织成越来越复杂的几何形状的各种纳米结构，例如1D层状，2D六角形和3D双连续立方相。这些脂质-NA装配体的多样性和复杂性从基本的角度来看是令人感兴趣的，并且与基因传递和基因沉默应用中的性能有关。不仅脂质NA结构的化学组成，而且其实际的超分子组织都会影响其基因转染和沉默效率的发现，激发了物理学家，化学家和工程师进入这一研究领域。目前，仍然存在一个悬而未决的问题，即不同的脂质NA结构如何与细胞和细胞器相互作用，以产生最佳反应。本文回顾了我们目前对不同脂质-NA复合物的结构以及相应的细胞相互作用机制的理解。将介绍设计基于脂质的最佳NA载体的最新进展，重点是结构-功能关系。