The ability of macroencapsulated Saccharomyces cerevisiae CBS8066 to withstand readily and not readily in situ convertible lignocellulose-derived inhibitors was investigated in anaerobic batch cultivations. It was shown that encapsulation increased the tolerance against readily convertible furan aldehyde inhibitors and to dilute acid spruce hydrolysate, but not to organic acid inhibitors that c...

Immune defences are an important component of fitness. Yet susceptibility to pathogens is common, suggesting the presence of ecological and evolutionary limitations on immune defences. Here, we use structural equation modelling to quantify the direct effects of resource quality and selection history, and their indirect effects mediated via body condition prior to an immune challenge on encapsul...

The melanotic encapsulation response mounted by Drosophila melanogaster against macroparasites, which is based on haemocyte binding to foreign objects, is poorly characterized relative to its humoral immune response against microbes, and appears to be variable across insect lineages. The genus Zaprionus is a diverse clade of flies embedded within the genus Drosophila. Here we characterize the i...

Large solutes such as high molecular weight proteins can be difficult to encapsulate in lipid vesicles. Passive trapping of these macromolecular solutes during vesicle formation typically results in concentrations inside the vesicles that are much lower than in the external solution. Here, we investigated the effect of macromolecular crowding on passive encapsulation of biological macromolecule...

Although carbon nanotubes are potential candidates for DNA encapsulation and subsequent delivery of biological payloads to living cells, the thermodynamical spontaneity of DNA encapsulation under physiological conditions is still a matter of debate. Using enhanced sampling techniques, we show for the first time that, given a sufficiently large carbon nanotube, the confinement of a double-strand...

Organisms in the wild are constantly faced with a wide range of environmental variability, such as fluctuation in food availability. Poor nutritional conditions influence life-histories via individual resource allocation patterns, and trade-offs between competing traits. In this study, we assessed the influence of food restriction during development on the energetically expensive traits flight ...

Molecular dynamics simulations are used to explore the effects of chaperonin-like cages on knotted proteins with very low sequence similarity, different depths of a knot but with a similar fold, and the same type of topology. The investigated proteins are VirC2, DndE and MJ0366 with two depths of a knot. A comprehensive picture how encapsulation influences folding rates is provided based on the...

Encapsulation of therapeutic molecules within polymer particles is a well-established method for achieving controlled release, yet challenges such as low loading, poor encapsulation efficiency, and loss of protein activity limit clinical translation. Despite this, the paradigm for the use of polymer particles in drug delivery has remained essentially unchanged for several decades. By taking adv...

Viral capsid-nanoparticle hybrid structures constitute a new type of nanoarchitecture that can be used for various applications. We previously constructed a hybrid structure comprising quantum dots encapsulated by simian virus 40 (SV40) capsids for imaging viral infection pathways. Here, gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are encapsulated into SV40 capsids and the effect of particle size and surface li...

Functionalisation of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) with atoms and molecules has the potential to prepare charge–transfer complexes for numerous applications. Here, we used density functional theory dispersion correction (DFT + D) examine encapsulation adsorption efficacy trap halogens. Our calculations show that is exoergic respect gas-phase atoms. The stability inside SWNTs revealed b...