I have prepared a polymer and would like to find out its effect on a cell membrane during freezing and drying. Is there any technique available to do that?
Maybe you should try electron microscopy. Good way to image membrane structure at high resolution and involves drying as part of the routine sample prep.
Thanks Daniel
Is it possible to find out what kind of functional groups of my polymer interacts or binds with the cell membrane through electron microscopy?
Not likely. Computational modeling would probably work better for that purpose. If you expect your polymer to interact with lipids, you might also think about working with liposomes or MLVs as a model rather than real membranes, to avoid the complexities introduced by the glycocalyx and various membrane proteins.
Thanx Daniel for the suggestion. But i am not too sure about computational modeling, have never done it. So can you please suggest me a good book on computational modelling or any previous literature for such kind of studies.
Unfortunately, computational modeling of this sort is not a trivial undertaking. To get a feel for the potential suitability of this method, I'd suggest looking at the following paper:
Polymer-drug interactions in tyrosine-derived triblock copolymer nanospheres: a computational modeling approach.
Costache AD, Sheihet L, Zaveri K, Knight DD, Kohn J.
Mol Pharm. 2009 Sep-Oct;6(5):1620-7.
PMID: 19650665
The success of such methods requires detailed physical characterization of your polymer to enable molecular dynamics simulations.
In terms of understanding how different functional groups interact with membranes of eukaryotic cells, you might also take a look at some of the literature from the Langer lab on polymers designed for cell transfection. For example.
Lipid-like materials for low-dose, in vivo gene silencing.
Love KT, Mahon KP, Levins CG, Whitehead KA, Querbes W, Dorkin JR, Qin J, Cantley W, Qin LL, Racie T, Frank-Kamenetsky M, Yip KN, Alvarez R, Sah DW, de Fougerolles A, Fitzgerald K, Koteliansky V, Akinc A, Langer R, Anderson DG.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Feb 2;107(5):1864-9.
PMID: 20080679
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