This proposal is for travel to the CBET Grantees Conference.
Funds awarded to Dr. Striolo under this award were used exclusively for travel. The proposal was submitted to allow the PI to attend the CBET grantees conference, which was held in Baltimore. The PI attended the conference and presented, in a poster, some of the recent results obtained from his group towards understanding how carbon nanotubes interact with phospholipid bilayers (liposomes). Liposomes are often used in cosmetics. In our work they were considered siplistic representations of cellular membranes. Note that cellular membranes are much more complex, as they contain proteins, cholesterol, and other molecules in addition to lipids. Within our project we combined modeling and experiments to see how carbon nanotubes and liposomes interact with each other in water. Our results suggest that the liposomes might adsorb on the carbon nanotubes without being disrupted. The modeling was performed for short carbon nanotubes embedded in the phospholipid membranes (imagine a syringe needle penetrating the membrane). We quantified how the structure of the lipids changes in response to the presence of the carbon nanotube. The results, still preliminary, suggests that the main effect is that the barrier properties of the membrane (cellular membranes control the flow of water, ions, hormons, and other molecules from the surrounding environment to the cell interior) are affected by the nanotubes. Future research will be needed to test the reliability of these predictions. In addition to presenting results, participating at the conference allowed the PI to network with other researchers within the United States. This is essential to secure relevance for future research.
