纳米酶和铁蛋白新特性的发现和应用

无机纳米材料通常被认为是生物惰性物质,但最新研究表明无机纳米材料本身具有与天然酶相似的催化活性。我们将这类具有类酶活性的纳米材料称为纳米酶。纳米酶的发现打破了人们对酶的传统认知,使纳米酶成为酶学领域研究的新热点。铁蛋白作为一种结构均一的天然球型纳米结构,不仅能够通过改造形成新型纳米酶,而且更重要的是天然铁蛋白本身能够特异性靶向肿瘤细胞,是一种十分理想的纳米药物载体。文章简单介绍纳米酶和铁蛋白的相关概念,并根据我们实验室的工作介绍两种纳米材料在环境治理、免疫检测以及肿瘤诊断治疗等多方面的研究,最后对纳米酶在生物医学中的未来研究方向进行简单展望。

The finding and application of the novel properties of nanozyme and ferritin

Inorganic nanomaterials are typically considered to be biologically inert. However, recent studies have shown that sometypes of inorganic nanomaterials exhibit catalytic activities similar to that of natural enzymes. We named this type of nanomaterials with enzyme-like activity as nanozyme. The finding of nanozyme breaks the traditional cognition of enzyme, and nanozyme is emerging as a new field of enzymology. Moreover, as a natural spherical nanostructure with uniform size, ferritin can be easily engineered to novel types of nanozymes. Importantly, natural ferritin can specifically target to many types of tumor cells without any modifications, which makes it as a promsing nanocarrier for tumor therapy. In this review, we briefly introduced the concepts of nanozymes and ferritin, and summarized our recent studies on nanozyme and ferritin in the fields of environmental management, immunoassay and tumor diagnosis and therapy. In addition, we gave prospects of nanozyme in biomedicine in the near future.