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POPSGene silencer and quantum dots reduce protein production to a whisper
Each quantum dot was surrounded by a proton sponge that carried a positive charge. Without any quantum dots attached, the siRNA's negative charge would prevent it from penetrating a cell's wall. With the quantum-dot chaperone, the more weakly charged siRNA complex crosses the cellular wall, escapes from the endosome (a fatty bubble that surrounds incoming material) and accumulates in the cellular fluid, where it can do its work disrupting protein manufacture. Key to the newly published approach is that researchers can adjust the chemical makeup of the quantum dot's proton-sponge coating, allowing the scientists to precisely control how tightly the dots attach to the siRNA. Quantum dots were dramatically better than existing techniques at stopping gene activity. In experiments, a cell's production of a test protein dropped to 2 percent when siRNA was delivered with quantum dots. By contrast, the test protein was produced at 13 percent to 51 percent of normal levels when the siRNA
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POPSNano RNA Delivery Novel delivery agents could mean a more targeted way to turn off disease genes. The MIT researchers, however, developed a way to make more than a thousand different delivery agents in parallel using a simple, one-step chemical process. And that allowed the team to quickly discover effective delivery molecules, including several that surprised the researchers. "We wouldn't have necessarily sat down and said, this is a structure that's going to work," says Daniel Anderson, a research associate at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. "It was only by making and testing over a thousand that we were able to get to that place."
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