Volume 126, Issue 18 pp. 4666-4669
Zuschrift

Voltage-Driven Reversible Insertion into and Leaving from a Lipid Bilayer: Tuning Transmembrane Transport of Artificial Channels

Wen Si

Wen Si

Department of Chemistry, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai 200433 (China)

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Prof. Zhan-Ting Li

Prof. Zhan-Ting Li

Department of Chemistry, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai 200433 (China)

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Prof. Jun-Li Hou

Corresponding Author

Prof. Jun-Li Hou

Department of Chemistry, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai 200433 (China)

Department of Chemistry, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai 200433 (China)===Search for more papers by this author
First published: 28 March 2014
Citations: 30

We are grateful to the National Basic Research Program (grant number 2013CB834501), the Ministry of Education of China (grant number IRT1117), NSFC (grant number 91027008), and FANEDD (grant number 200930) for financial support.

Abstract

Three new artificial transmembrane channel molecules have been designed and synthesized by attaching positively charged Arg-incorporated tripeptide chains to pillar[5]arene. Fluorescent and patch-clamp experiments revealed that voltage can drive the molecules to insert into and leave from a lipid bilayer and thus switch on and off the transport of K+ ions. One of the molecules was found to display antimicrobial activity toward Bacillus subtilis with half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) of 10 μM which is comparable to that of natural channel-forming peptide alamethicin.

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