Research Description

Our group will focus on fundamental relationships between the chemical and physical properties of nanoparticles made from biological building blocks. As these nanoparticles are made of molecules like proteins or lipids, they are self-assembled by many weak noncovalent interactions, but they ultimately form singular objects. This leads us to ask many questions about their assembly and molecular behavior, such as:

• How do molecular contacts and chemical environments influence physical properties like cargo loading and density?
• Conversely, how does the physical assembly affect access to internalized cargo such as enzymes?
• What principles do biological nanocontainers use that we could apply to drug delivery or generating specific molecules?
• How can we measure these effects on a benchtop microscope?

A key piece in studying these objects is that they can be highly heterogeneous in their properties: each object is different in terms of aspects like their size, stoichiometry, and molecular arrangement within the particle, which means that we need to observe these various properties simultaneously on single members in the population. Our group will be developing sensitive single-particle observation techniques such as anti-Brownian trapping, single-molecule spectroscopy, and cryo-electron microscopy to determine relationships between the various properties in these soft nanoparticle systems. These methods will allow us to observe single objects with unprecedented detail and inspire new strategies for designing next-generation biomolecular nanoparticles.