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theses

In the design of drug delivery vehicles, self-assembled nanostructured materials such as liposomes, polymerosomes and hybrid biomaterials bears increasing attentions. The key challenges in the optimal modification of these soft materials is the prediction of resultant morphologies in favor of circulation time, as well as the optimization of surface properties to adjust the interactions between bio-inspired materials with nanoparticles and bio-macromolecules such as peptides, proteins and nucleic acids. One of the ways to overcome these challenges is through the development of flexible modeling tools to address physical phenomena under a mesoscopic scale, allowing us to deeply investigate interfacial problems of nanostructured materials in a dynamic approach. In this work, we utilize the Dissipative Particle Dynamics simulation technique to examine the interaction between peptide mimetic nanoparticles (nanopin) and multicomponent vesicles. We study the role of nanopin architecture and cholesterol concentration on the capture of the nanopins by the bilayer, their insertion and post-insertion self-organization. Furthermore, we investigate the transportation of hybrid vesicle with various concentrations of end-functionalized lipids. We draw correlation among the morphology, composition and mechanical properties of the vesicle and flow conditions. Our results can potentially help in the design of drug delivery system with respect to their transport in blood capillaries, and tissue engineering for the design of microfluidic devices with better in-vivo transportation efficiency. Our study can also provide guidelines for designing peptide-mimetic nanoparticles or macromolecules which can interface with living cells to serve as sensors for applications in medicine, sustainability and energy.

ETD_7114

M.S.

Includes bibliographical references

by Xiaolei Chu

doi:10.7282/T3JM2CSW

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.