Hydrogels are widely used in many applications such as tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and drug delivery.  To produce new bimimetic materials (e.g., scaffolds) with tailored structure and properties requires a better understanding of the self-assembly behavior of small gelator molecules in the biological environment.  There are two major approaches to study the self-assembly process.  In the first, the hydrogelator is covalently labeled with a suitable fluorophore, and the self-assembly process aligns both the hydrogelator molecules and the appended fluorophores into nanofibers.  The second approach does not require labeling of the molecules of interest.  It is based on correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) investigation of the self-assembly of small molecules in their native form inside mammalian cells.  Both methods allow us to determine the formation, localization, and progression of molecular assemblies generated from small molecular hydrogelators by an enzyme-triggered hydrogelation mechanism in cells. Previously, we demonstrated how the precursors go into the cell, where the molecular assembly occurs, and we determined the interaction between molecular assemblies and cellular organelles.  This work establishes a general strategy to describe the spatiotemporal profile of molecular assemblies inside cells.  A new model system is used to mimic cellular mechanisms and processes related to endogenous-normal and aberrant-protein nanofibers.

Supramolecular self-assembly for fluorescence imaging inside living cells

248th National Meeting (2014)

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