Design Principles of Lipid-like Ionic Liquids for Gene Delivery

We
developed lipid-like ionic liquids, containing 2-mercaptoimidazolium
and 2-mercaptothiazolinium headgroups tethered to two long saturated
alkyl chains, as carriers for in vitro delivery of plasmid HEK DNA
into 293T cells. We employed a combination of modular design, synthesis,
X-ray analysis, and computational modeling to rationalize the self-assembly
and desired physicochemical and biological properties. The results
suggest that thioamide-derived ionic liquids may serve as a modular
platform for lipid-mediated gene delivery. This work represents a
step toward understanding the structure–function relationships
of these amphiphiles with long-range ordering and offering insight
into design principles for synthetic vectors based on self-assembly
behavior.