Abstract
“Smart” polymeric microcapsules with excellent permeability of membranes have drawn considerable attention in scientific and industrial research such as drug delivery carriers, microreactors, and artificial organelles. In this work, hybrid hollow polymeric microcapsules (HPs) containing redox-active gold-sulfide bond were prepared with bovine serum albumin, inorganic metal cluster (AuNCs), and poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) conjugates by using Pickering emulsion method. HPs were transferred from water-in-oil to water-in-water by adding PEGbis(N-succinimidylsuccinate). To achieve redox-responsive membrane, the Au-S bond units incorporated into the microcapsules’ membranes, allowed us to explore the effects of a new stimuli, that is, the redox Au-S bond breaking on the microcapsules’ membranes. The permeability of these hybrid hollow polymeric microcapsules could be sensitively tuned via adding environment-friendly hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), resulting from a fast fracture of Au-S bond. Meanwhile, AuNCs and conjugates could depart from the microcapsules, and enhance the permeability of the membrane. Based on the excellent permeability of the membrane, phosphatase was encapsuled into HPs and p-nitrophenyl phosphate as a substrate. After adding 1 × 10−2 and 1 × 10−4 M H2O2, the catalytic efficiency was nearly 4.06 and 2.22 times higher than that of HPs in the absence of H2O2, respectively. Hence, the unique redox-responsive HPs have potential applications in biocatalytic reaction, drug delivery, and materials as well as in bioscience.
Highlights
In recent years, “smart” hollow polymeric microcapsules, with their special structures, have attracted great interest in many kinds of research fields and from several groups of scientists all over the world [1–4]
1H-NMR spectra were recorded on Bruker Advance-400 MHz (Lausanne, Switzer1 H-NMR spectra were recorded on Bruker Advance-400 MHz (Lausanne, Switzerland), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) analysis was undertaken on a JEM-1400 land), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) analysis was undertaken on a JEM-1400 (Akishima-shi, Japan)
The high-resolution transmission electron mimicroscopy (HRTEM) image (Figure 2a) indicated clearly that the shell of hollow polymeric microcapsules (HPs) consisted of croscopy (HRTEM) image (Figure 2a) indicated clearly that the shell of HPs consisted of a flexible ultrathin membrane that was structurally robust even when dried under vacuum
Summary
“smart” hollow polymeric microcapsules, with their special structures, have attracted great interest in many kinds of research fields and from several groups of scientists all over the world [1–4]. The aqueous core surrounded by a membrane integrated chemical ensembles, showing great potential applications in many fields such as biomedicine, catalysis, biosensing, and synthetic protocellular systems These functions are related to the exchange of substances between the inside and outside part. Scientists paid more attention to making hollow microcompartments undergo a chemical or physical change in response to environmental stimuli such as pH, temperature, redox species, light, magnetic, and electric fields [5–9]. These chemical or physical changes will lead to the self-assembly of porous membranes, resulting in the breakage or re-formation of channel pores at the edges of the membranes. To the best our knowledge, this is the first time that the permeability of membrane of hybrid redox-responsive hollow polymeric microcapsules is reported
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