Compartmentalization is a key concept in living organisms and provides cells with methods to gain spatiotemporal control over their reaction pathways. In this way, fragile components can be protected against degradation, or incompatible reaction environments can be separated from each other by confining them to different organelles. Mimicking such systems allows for a better understanding of compartmentalization in nature.The most prominent compartments inside cells are organelles, and to mimic these, we use semi-porous polymeric nanoreactors that can encapsulate enzymes. Their structure allows only for diffusion of small molecules like substrates into the nanoreactor, while larger molecules are excluded. By functionalization of the nanoreactor surface with cell-penetrating peptides, cell uptake is triggered and these nanoreactors can be used as additional functional compartments inside cells, providing them with new functionalities and prolonging activity of entrapped enzymes (A).Besides application in living cells, organelle mimics can also be used to create artificial cell mimics. For this, the enzyme-filled nanoreactors, together with other enzymes and reaction components, can be loaded into larger, cell-sized, polymer vesicles (B). In these systems we observe that the performed cascade reactions take place exclusively inside the cell mimics and over multiple organelle compartments. Furthermore, compartmentalization of enzymes can also be used to introduce incompatible enzymes into the reaction sequence, while still maintaining activity for a longer period of time compared to when all enzymes are free in solution.

Polymeric nanoreactors as organelle and cell mimics

247th National Meeting (2014)

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