Abstract

Protein adsorption onto polymer surfaces is a very complex and ubiquitous phenomenon whose integrated process impacts essential applications in our daily lives such as food packaging materials, health devices, diagnostic tools, and medical products. Increasingly, novel polymer materials with greater chemical intricacy and reduced dimensionality are used for various applications involving adsorbed proteins on their surfaces. Hence, the nature of protein-surface interactions to consider is becoming much more complicated than before. A large body of literature exists for protein adsorption. However, most of these investigations have focused on collectively measured, ensemble-averaged protein behaviors that occur on macroscale and chemically unvarying polymer surfaces instead of direct measurements at the single protein or sub-protein level. In addition, interrogations of protein-polymer adsorption boundaries in these studies were typically carried out by indirect methods, whose insights may not be suitably applied for explaining individual protein adsorption processes occurring onto nanostructured, chemically varying polymer surfaces. Therefore, an important gap in our knowledge still exists that needs to be systematically addressed via direct measurement means at the single protein and sub-protein level. Such efforts will require multifaceted experimental and theoretical approaches that can probe multilength scales of protein adsorption, while encompassing both single proteins and their collective ensemble behaviors at the length scale spanning from the nanoscopic all the way to the macroscopic scale. In this review, key research achievements in nanoscale protein adsorption to date will be summarized. Specifically, protein adsorption studies involving polymer surfaces with their defining feature dimensions and associated chemical partitions comparable to the size of individual proteins will be discussed in detail. In this regard, recent works bridging the crucial knowledge gap in protein adsorption will be highlighted. New findings of intriguing protein surface assembly behaviors and adsorption kinetics unique to nanoscale polymer templates will be covered. Single protein and sub-protein level approaches to reveal unique nanoscale protein-polymer surface interactions and protein surface assembly characteristics will be also emphasized. Potential advantages of these research endeavors in laying out fundamentally guided design principles for practical product development will then be discussed. Lastly, important research areas still needed to further narrow the knowledge gap in nanoscale protein adsorption will be identified.

中文翻译：

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在单一生物分子水平上了解具有化学变化的纳米级聚合物表面特有的蛋白质吸附现象的最新进展

摘要

蛋白质吸附到聚合物表面上是一个非常复杂且普遍存在的现象，其集成过程会影响我们日常生活中的基本应用，例如食品包装材料，保健设备，诊断工具和医疗产品。具有越来越高的化学复杂性和减小的尺寸的新型聚合物材料越来越多地用于涉及其表面吸附蛋白质的各种应用。因此，要考虑的蛋白质-表面相互作用的性质比以前复杂得多。存在大量关于蛋白质吸附的文献。但是，这些研究大多数都集中于在宏观和化学不变的聚合物表面上发生的集体测量的，总体平均的蛋白质行为，而不是在单个蛋白质或亚蛋白质水平上的直接测量。另外，在这些研究中对蛋白质-聚合物吸附边界的询问通常是通过间接方法进行的，其见解可能不适用于解释发生在纳米结构的化学变化的聚合物表面上的各个蛋白质吸附过程。因此，在我们的知识中仍然存在重要的空白，需要通过直接测量手段在单个蛋白质和亚蛋白质水平上系统地解决。这样的努力将需要多方面的实验和理论方法，以探测蛋白质吸附的多尺度，同时涵盖从纳米到宏观的整个尺度的单个蛋白质及其集体整体行为。在这篇评论中 总结了迄今为止纳米级蛋白质吸附的关键研究成果。具体而言，将详细讨论涉及聚合物表面的蛋白质吸附研究，这些聚合物表面具有定义的特征尺寸和与单个蛋白质的大小相当的相关化学分区。在这方面，将着重介绍弥合蛋白质吸附中关键知识鸿沟的最新工作。涵盖了纳米级聚合物模板特有的有趣的蛋白质表面组装行为和吸附动力学的新发现。还应强调单一蛋白质和亚蛋白质水平的方法，以揭示独特的纳米级蛋白质-聚合物表面相互作用和蛋白质表面组装特征。然后将讨论这些研究工作在为实际产品开发提供从根本上指导的设计原则方面的潜在优势。最后，将确定仍需要进一步缩小纳米级蛋白质吸附知识差距的重要研究领域。