Аннотация:In general, bio-macromolecules are composed of hydrophilic and hydrophobic moieties and are confined within
small cavities, such as cell membranes and intracellular organelles. We have studied the self-organization of macromolecules having groups with different affinities to solvents under spherical nano-scale confinement by means of computer modeling [1]. Fig. 1 depicts the diagram of state for a single amphiphilic macromolecule in poor solvent: ε AB is parameter of incompatibility between units A of main chain and side groups B; R is the radius of spherical confinement, where the macromolecule is placed.
The most interesting structures for possible applications are hollow nanospheres (Fig. 2) – spherical globules with a hollow interior. They could serve as nanosized containers for transport of substances through an outer matrix, in which they are otherwise soluble. The hollow nanospheres are stable and should be simple in preparation and varying of their size and the size of their hollow interior.
The work was supported by Russian Science Foundation (project 14-13-00745). The computations were
performed using the resources of Supercomputing Center of Lomonosov Moscow State University [2].
References
1) A. A. Glagoleva, V. V. Vasilevskaya, K. Yoshikawa, and A. R. Khokhlov, J. Chem. Phys. 2013, 139, 244901.
2) V. Sadovnichy et al. In “Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale” (Chapman &
Hall/CRC Computational Science), pp. 283-307, Boca Raton, USA, CRC Press, 2013.