Design of lipophilic split aptamers as artificial carriers for transmembrane transport of adenosine triphosphate

Abstract

Transmembrane transport plays an important role in many physiological functions, and mimicking this biological process in artificial systems has potential applications in biosensing, drug delivery, and bionic science. Here, a lipophilic split aptamer was developed as a novel transmembrane carrier for adenosine triphosphate (ATP) transport. The ATP carrier comprises two split aptamer fragments and cholesterol tags, with the split aptamers acting as target-recognition domains to enhance their specific binding capability and the cholesterol tags as hydrophobic domains to facilitate membrane penetration. Giant unilamellar vesicle experiments demonstrated that the ATP carrier-mediated transmembrane transport was concentration- and time-dependent and showed high transport selectivity. Moreover, the artificial carriers were applicable to living cells and facilitated rapid cell internalization of fluorescence-labeled ATP. Furthermore, carrier-mediated ATP transport into ATP-deficient cells enabled recovery of cellular ATP levels and improved cell viability. This study demonstrated the efficacy of an aptamer nanostructure for designing DNA-based synthetic carriers with high selectivity and flexibility.