Dynamics of Protein-Confined Water in Polymer Vesicles: A Feasibility Study

DOI

When we confine water in extremely small spaces it starts to move extremely slowly. This behaviour is critical to helping biological molecules like proteins function normally. We have developed a system in which we can place very large amounts of protein in hollow containers called vesicles, which can be as small as 50 nanometres. When we encapsulate special types of proteins called enzymes, which help the body perform chemical reactions, we find the enzymes work faster when they're inside the vesicles than they do when they're outside it. Even more remarkably, we find that when we heat up our vesicles, enzymes inside the vesicles continue to work at temperatures that would normally break them. We think we can explain our findings by studying how changing the amount of protein in a vesicle changes the way the water inside the vesicle moves.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.RB1920516-1
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/108676785
Provenance
Creator Dr Laura Rodriguez Arco; Dr Fabrizia Foglia; Dr Azzurra Apriceno; Professor Christoph Salzmann; Dr Joseph Forth; Professor Beppe Battaglia; Dr Victoria Garcia Sakai
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2022
Rights CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact isisdata(at)stfc.ac.uk
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Biology; Biomaterials; Engineering Sciences; Life Sciences; Materials Science; Materials Science and Engineering
Temporal Coverage Begin 2019-12-10T08:30:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2019-12-13T09:44:12Z