A polysaccharide-based container transportation system powered by molecular motors.

In living cells, the motor protein myosin, which is driven by ATP hydrolysis, intracellularly transports cargo such as vesicles and organelles 2] by moving along actin filaments. There have been many reports of how myosin can transport artificial cargoes such as polystyrene microspheres, 4] gold nanoparticles, and quantum dots. 7] Recently, cargo transportation systems powered by artificial nanomotors were actively studied. However, in these studies, the biomolecular or nanomotors are directly bound to the specific cargo. Therefore, these systems can be applied only to the delivery of certain types of cargo. Herein, we report the first container transportation system to be powered by biological motors. In this system, myosin is attached to a polysaccharide-based container that can hold a cargo. In fact, under physiological conditions, myosin binds to a container-like vesicle that holds a cargo. As the polysaccharide can form complexes with various cargoes such as carbon nanotubes and DNA, we envision that this novel container transportation system will expand the applicability of artificial intracellular transportation systems, including medically relevant procedures such as gene therapy. We have previously reported the very interesting “dynamic” properties of b-1,3-glucan polysaccharides, which are typified by schizophyllan (SPG). In nature, SPG adopts a triple-stranded helical structure (t-SPG), which dissociates into a single chain (s-SPG) upon dissolution in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). The s-SPG chain can recover its original triple-stranded helix when DMSO is exchanged for water. These processes are referred to as denature (from t-SPG to sSPG) and renature (from s-SPG to t-SPG), respectively (Figure 1a). We found that b-1,3-glucans and their derivatives can act as 1D hosts that helically wrap nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes, conjugated polymers, DNA, and gold nanoparticles, and allow these nanomaterials to be dissolved in water through the denature–renature process. Therefore, we selected SPG as the container for our system. A schematic representation of our novel container transportation system is shown in Figure 1b. The “cargo” is wrapped with the “container” and transported on the “rail” by “wheels”. We choose single-walled carbon nanotubes

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