Stable Disk Assemblies of a Tobacco Mosaic Virus Mutant as Nanoscale Scaffolds for Applications in Drug Delivery.

Current approaches to nanoscale therapeutic delivery rely on the attachment of a drug of interest to a nanomaterial scaffold that is capable of releasing the drug selectively in a tumor environment. One class of nanocarriers receiving significant attention is protein nanomaterials, which are biodegradable and homogeneous in morphology and can be equipped with multiple functional handles for drug attachment. Although most protein-based nanocarriers are spherical in morphology, recent research has revealed that nonspherical nanomaterials may have favorable tumor uptake in comparison to their spherical counterparts. It is therefore important to expand the number of nonspherical protein-based nanocarriers that are available. Herein, we report the development of a self-assembling nanoscale disk derived from a double arginine mutant of recombinantly expressed tobacco mosaic virus coat protein (RR-TMV). RR-TMV disks display highly stable double-disk assembly states. These RR-TMV disks were functionalized with the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin (DOX) and further modified with polyethylene glycol (PEG) for improved solubility. RR-TMVDOX-PEG displayed cytotoxic properties similar to those of DOX alone when incubated with U87MG glioblastoma cells, but unmodified RR-TMV did not cause any cytotoxicity. The RR-TMV disk assembly represents a promising protein-based nanomaterial for applications in drug delivery.

RNA-sequencing from single nuclei.

It has recently been established that synthesis of double-stranded cDNA can be done from a single cell for use in DNA sequencing. Global gene expression can be quantified from the number of reads mapping to each gene, and mutations and mRNA splicing variants determined from the sequence reads. Here we demonstrate that this method of transcriptomic analysis can be done using the extremely low levels of mRNA in a single nucleus, isolated from a mouse neural progenitor cell line and from dissected hippocampal tissue. This method is characterized by excellent coverage and technical reproducibility. On average, more than 16,000 of the 24,057 mouse protein-coding genes were detected from single nuclei, and the amount of gene-expression variation was similar when measured between single nuclei and single cells. Several major advantages of the method exist: first, nuclei, compared with whole cells, have the advantage of being easily isolated from complex tissues and organs, such as those in the CNS. Second, the method can be widely applied to eukaryotic species, including those of different kingdoms. The method also provides insight into regulatory mechanisms specific to the nucleus. Finally, the method enables dissection of regulatory events at the single-cell level; pooling of 10 nuclei or 10 cells obscures some of the variability measured in transcript levels, implying that single nuclei and cells will be extremely useful in revealing the physiological state and interconnectedness of gene regulation in a manner that avoids the masking inherent to conventional transcriptomics using bulk cells or tissues.