Nanoscale networking: Engineering polymer vesicle communication with connexin

Cellular sensing and communication provide the very foundation for multicellular life as we know it. Indeed, the ability to transduce and disseminate information from the environment is a requirement for organisms on many scales. As a result, communication takes on numerous forms, but at its core is information transfer. Nature has evolved a myriad of systems mechanical, chemical, and biological; from amoeba chemotaxis to cascading neuronal action potentials, communicating cellular networks form adaptive and emergent systems irreducible to the sum of their constituents. The shared hurdle for these systems is acquiring the signal from the environment across the cell membrane.;Lipid bilayers provide a semipermeable barrier, allowing organisms to interact with their environment, and at the same time, regulate the passage of ions, DNA, and other essential solutes in and out of the cell. One membrane protein responsible for regulating such solutes is the gap junction protein connexin. This manuscript investigates the use of connexin as a means to allow communication between nanoscale biomimetic polymer vesicles. Specifically, Cx43 labeled with a c-terminus green fluorescent protein tag is used to form aqueous channels between polymer vesicles for the transfer of calcium and ATP. During development, protein functionality and conductance were measured in a planar lipid system, elucidating previously undocumented subconductive states. Polymer vesicle communication represents a preliminary step toward the creation of an artificial testing platform for cellular communication, and the possibility of establishing a nanoscale dendritic tree comparable to a primitive neural network.