Modeling Nonspecific Interactions at Biological Interfaces

Abstract

Difficulties in applied biomaterials often arise from the complexities of interactions in biological environments. These interactions can be broadly broken into two categories: those which are important to function (strong binding to a single target) and those which are detrimental to function (weak binding to many targets). These will be referred to as specific and nonspecific interactions, respectively. Nonspecific interactions have been central to failures of biomaterials, sensors, and surface coatings in harsh biological environments. There is little modeling work on studying nonspecific interactions. Modeling all possible nonspecific interactions within a biological system is difficult, yet there are ways to both indirectly model nonspecific interactions and directly model many interactions using machine-learning. This research utilizes bioinformatics, phenomenological modeling, molecular simulations, experiments, and stochastic modeling to study nonspecific interactions. These techniques are used to study the hydration molecules which resist nonspecific interactions, the formation of salt bridges, the chemistry of protein surfaces, nonspecific stabilization of proteins in molecular chaperones, and analysis of high-throughput screening experiments. The common aspect for these systems is that nonspecific interactions are more important than specific interactions. Studying these disparate systems has created a set of principles for resisting nonspecific interactions which have been experimentally demonstrated with the creation and testing of novel materials which resist nonspecific interactions.