Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    Bionano Interactions: A Key to Mechanistic Understanding of Nanoparticle Toxicity
    The new paradigm in the assessment of toxicity of nanomaterials relies on a mechanistic understanding of the organism’s response to an exposure to foreign materials from the initial, molecular level interactions to signaling and regulatory cascades. Here, we present a methodology to quantify the essential interactions at the bionano interface, which can be used in combination with the adverse outcome pathway analysis to build mechanism-based predictive schemes for toxicity assessments. We introduce a set of new, advanced descriptors of the nanomaterials, which refer to their ability to bind biomolecules and trigger the pathways via the molecular initiating events.
      322
  • Publication
    In Silico Prediction of Protein Adsorption Energy on Titanium Dioxide and Gold Nanoparticles
    The free energy of adsorption of proteins onto nanoparticles offers an insight into the biological activity of these particles in the body, but calculating these energies is challenging at the atomistic resolution. In addition, structural information of the proteins may not be readily available. In this work, we demonstrate how information about adsorption affinity of proteins onto nanoparticles can be obtained from first principles with minimum experimental input. We use a multiscale model of protein–nanoparticle interaction to evaluate adsorption energies for a set of 59 human blood serum proteins on gold and titanium dioxide (anatase) nanoparticles of various sizes. For each protein, we compare the results for 3D structures derived from experiments to those predicted computationally from amino acid sequences using the I-TASSER methodology and software. Based on these calculations and 2D and 3D protein descriptors, we develop statistical models for predicting the binding energy of proteins, enabling the rapid characterization of the affinity of nanoparticles to a wide range of proteins.
      156Scopus© Citations 14