Stabilized Vesicle-Functionalized Microparticles for Chemical Separations

This invention relates to bioassay platforms, in particular, pull-down assay platforms using silica core-polymerized phospholipid vesicle shell particles for peptide/protein ligand screening.

Background:
Many physiological or pathological events involve the molecular recognition and binding between a peptide/protein ligand and a specific target on the cell membrane. Certain ligand-receptor binding events trigger corresponding cellular responses, such as enzyme activity and gene expression. Nowadays, screening of peptide/protein ligands that bind to targets on cell membranes is an important process in drug discovery. There is a need for rapid and highly specific assay platforms for identifying novel ligand receptor interactions while minimizing crosstalk and non-specific binding. To address this need this technology provides a novel microparticle architecture that utilizes stabilized vesicle-functionalized microparticles for separations.

Applications:

• The stabilized vesicles can subsequently be functionalized with either transmembrane receptors or membrane associated receptors
• Affinity pull-down assays
• Other chromatographic separation modalities to provide affinity capture/concentration of low abundance ligands in complex mixtures with minimal sample preparation
• Electrochemical detection or optical spectroscopy when coupled directly with both electrospray ionization and matrix assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry  
• New families of inexpensive, functional materials for the use in nanomaterial sciences
• Discovery and identification of unknown ligand/receptor pairs with minimal sample preparation

Advantages:

• A rapid and highly specific assay platform 
• Identifies novel ligand-receptor interactions
• Minimizes crosstalk and non-specific binding
• Relies upon interactions existing in nature rather than complex and time consuming synthesis and selection of antibodies
• Potential to reduce interference from complicated signaling events in cell-based functional assays
• Identifies an unknown ligand from a ligand mixture
• Provides quantitative analysis of the binding complement due to the stability of the polymeric phospholipid vesicles