Characterizing the Hard and Soft Nanoparticle-Protein Corona with Multilayer Adsorption

TL;DR

This paper reviews current methods for characterizing nanoparticle soft coronas and introduces a new open-source computational model to simulate their dynamic behavior, focusing on transferrin-polystyrene interactions.

Contribution

It presents a novel computational model for simulating the soft corona's dynamics, addressing experimental challenges and providing deeper insights into its structure.

Findings

Soft corona exhibits glassy evolution influenced by crowding effects

The model accurately captures soft corona dynamics and structure

Bridges experimental limitations with improved simulations

Abstract

Nanoparticles (NPs) in contact with biological fluid adsorb biomolecules into a corona. This corona comprises proteins that strongly bind to the NP (hard corona) and loosely bound proteins (soft corona) that dynamically exchange with the surrounding solution. While the kinetics of hard corona formation is relatively well understood, thanks to experiments and robust simulation models, the experimental characterization and simulation of the soft corona present a more significant challenge. Here, we review the current state of the art in soft corona characterization and introduce a novel open-source computational model to simulate its dynamic behavior, for which we provide the documentation. We focus on the case of transferrin (Tf) interacting with polystyrene NPs as an illustrative example, demonstrating how this model captures the complexities of the soft corona and offers deeper insights into its structure and behavior. We show that the soft corona is dominated by a glassy evolution that we relate to crowding effects. This work advances our understanding of the soft corona, bridging experimental limitations with improved simulation techniques.