Category: In the Press

A paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America entitled “Nanovesicles displaying functional linear and branched oligomannose self-assembled from sequence-defined Janus glycodendrimers” was published recently by our group and highlighted by E. K. Brockmeier “A new tool for cell biologists” in Penn Today. This work is a collaboration between Penn, Temple University, the Max Planck Institute, the Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials, RWTH Aachen University, and Freie Universität Berlin, This story demonstrated how our research on synthetic vesicles coated with oligomannose can do for coronavirus.

A paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America was published recently by the Percec group and highlighted by E. K. Brockmeier “Cells use sugars to communicate at the molecular level” in Penn Today.

The paper reports by using atomic force microscopy images that were fast fourier-transformed, we found that sugars on the surface of synthetic cells organize themselves automatically into thin lamellar layered and hexagonal patterns. The shapes that the sugar molecules form allows the synthetic cells to be recognized by other cells and also enhances their reactivity with proteins.