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

• Main Authors: Vilanova, Oriol, Martinez-Serra, Alberto, Monopoli, Marco P, Franzese, Giancarlo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 20-11-2024
• Subjects: Physics - Soft Condensed Matter
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2411.13279

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.