International Summer School PROGRAM - Laboratoire d'Infochimie ...

Molecular Recognition on multi-Receptor Synthetic Membranes – Towards
Imprinted Vesicular Surfaces
Tobias Lang a , Benjamin Gruber a , Stefan Balk a , Burkhard König a, *
a
University of Regensburg, Universitätsstraße 31, 93053 Regensburg
e-mail: burkhard.koenig@chemie.uni-regensburg.de
Non-covalent interactions of receptors and ligands at liposomal surfaces are very similar to
recognition processes at biological membranes. Molecular recognition on such membranes is
often governed by dynamic multivalent interactions. Based on previously reported vesicular
chemosensors for the recognition of small biomolecules, [1] we currently focus on more
complex liposomal systems with different artificial binding sites for the dynamic recognition
of multivalent target molecules. The visualization and structuring of such multi-receptor
surfaces could give access to an interesting imprinting strategy:
Figure 1. Schematic drawing of an imprinting approach of a receptor embedded vesicular surface to
improve the binding affinity towards a multivalent ligand.
Surface-exposed binding sites could be patterned by heating the membranes above their main
phase transition temperature in the presence of multivalent template molecules and
subsequent cooling and removal of the templates. The Visualization of such functionalized
surfaces requires special techniques and could be achieved by AFM, STM or SFG for
instance.
[1] B. Gruber, S. Stadlbauer, A. Späth, S. Weiss, M. Kalinina, B. König, Ang. Chem. Int. Ed. 2010,
49, 7125.