Speaker: Dr. Mohit Kumar
Faculty of Chemistry, University of Barcelona, Spain
Title: "Active Vesicles: Nanocontainers for temporally
regulated cargo delivery."
Day and Date: Friday, January 05, 2024
Time: 3:10 - 3:50 pm
Venue: Room no. 350, Chemistry Department
Second floor, Annex
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Hosted by Prof. Chidambar Kulkarni
Abstract Chemical reactions in living systems are regulated by metabolic processes like the
anabolic formation of bio-macromolecules and catabolic degradation of food into energy.
These reactions often consume chemical energy and result in active self-assembled structures
that exist under out-of-equilibrium (OOE) conditions, which facilitate unique functions of life.
In this talk, I will discuss a bio-inspired supramolecular system that form transient lipid vesicles
under OOE conditions, resulting in vesicles with a programmable lifetime. We use simple
imine chemistry for the formation of phospholipid and enzymatic ester hydrolysis for the
degradation of lipids and the resultant vesicles. We will also demonstrate that the lifetime of
these structures can be easily regulated based on the requirement. Finally, these active lipid
vesicles can dynamically regulate the release kinetics of encapsulated cargos (drug and dye
molecules) by simply changing the concentration of enzyme. We are working towards using
these active vesicles as an adaptive interface for targeted drug delivery.