Formation mechanism and kinetics of lipid-based nano carriers of mRNA.

We propose to investigate the formation of lipid-based nanocarriers of mRNA to obtain a generic understanding of its underlying mechanism and ultimately provide a generic methodology to design an efficient nanocarrier for a given polynucleotide/application. This request for beamtime would provide us with time-resolved structural monitoring of the formation process by coupling the intense and narrow X-ray beam available at ID02 with an original microfluidic chip that allows the mixing of two different solvents within 0.2 ms. We will perform SAXS measurements at different positions of the chip that operates in a continuous flow, which will enable us to obtain robust time-resolved scattering data and thus resolve the complex structure of the nanocarriers. The parametric exploration enabled by microfluidics will yield the formation/structure relationship underlying the formation of these promising objects.