Abstract
Inspired by the natural phospholipid structures for cell membrane, a synthetic phospholipid LC with an ion recognition group benzo-18-crown-6 (B18C6) moiety was prepared which has been demonstrated to be able to transport ions across the lipid bilayers. Fluorescent vesicle assay shows that LC has an excellent transport activity, and the EC50 value for K+ is 11.2 μM. The voltage clamp measurement exhibits regular square-like current signals with considerably long opening times, which indicates that LC achieves efficient ion transport through a channel mechanism and its single channel conductivity is 17 pS. Both of the vesicle assay and patch clamp tests indicate that LC has selectivity for Rb+, whose ionic radius is larger than the cavity of crown ether. It suggests that the sandwich interaction may play a key role in the ion transport across lipid bilayers. All these results help us to speculate that LC transports ions via a channel mechanism with a tetrameric aggregate as the active structure. In addition, LC had obvious toxicity to HeLa cells, and the IC50 was 100.0 μM after coculture for 36 h. We hope that this simple synthetic phospholipid will offer novel perspectives in the development of more efficient and selective ion transporters.
Highlights
Cell is the basic unit of structure and function for all organisms
Considering the energy required for the ion to move across the bilayer membrane, the ion transporter should provide enough intermolecular interaction to compensate for the loss of ion hydration energy
The appearance of characteristic shifts of Ha, Hb, Hc, and Hd assigned to B18C6 confirmed the successful incorporation of an ion recognition group into a nature lipid Lyso PC (1-palmitoyl-2-hydroxy-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine) (Figure 2A)
Summary
Cell is the basic unit of structure and function for all organisms. Cell membrane is the barrier for cell to survive independently, and the medium for cell to contact with the surrounding environment and other cells. Inspired by the functional sophistication of ion transporters in nature, supramolecular chemists have created a variety of synthetic systems to replicate the transport functions by using small molecules and synthetic compounds (Kim and Sessler, 2015; Si et al, 2015; Chen et al, 2018a,b, 2020; Wu et al, 2018; Zhang et al, 2019; Zheng et al, 2020).
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