The cell surface not only functions as a physical barrier for protecting the cell, but also displays a variety of functional biomolecules. These molecules play essential roles of determining the ability of the cell in recognizing its microenvironment. Thus, a variety of genetic engineering and chemical methods have been developed to functionalize the surface of live cells with exogenous biomolecules for new functionalities of molecular recognition. These methods have been widely studied for applications such as immunotherapy, tissue engineering and stem cell homing. However, these prominent methods were historically developed for unimolecular functionalization, <i>i.e.</i>, the display of single biomolecule on each spot of the cell surface. As surface functionalization is to promote biomolecular recognition, it is desirable to functionalize cell surface with polyvalent molecules. The purpose of this work is to explore a new chemical method for polyvalent display of biomolecules on the live cells (<i>i.e.</i>, polyvalent functionalization). This method involves biological, chemical and hybridization reactions that are all performed under physiological conditions. The results show that the polyvalent display of biomolecules on the cell surface enhances the capability of molecular recognition of engineered cells by at least one order of magnitude. Thus, polyvalent display of biomolecules on live cells is promising for a variety of biological and biomedical applications such as cell-mediated delivery of nanoparticles.

Supramolecular DNA assembly for surface functionalization of live cells

2019 Spring National Meeting

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