A Membrane-Embedded Macromolecular Catalyst with Substrate Selectivity in Live Cells

Substrate selectivity is one of the most attractive features of natural enzymes from their "bind-to-catalyze" working flow and is thus a goal for the development of synthetic enzyme mimics that mediate abiotic transformations. However, despite the recent success in the preparation of substrate-selective enzyme mimics based on single-chain nanoparticles, examples extending such selectivity into living systems have been absent. In this article, we report the in cellulo substrate selectivity of an enzyme-mimicking macromolecular catalyst based on a cationic dense-shell nanoparticle (DSNP) scaffold. With a systematic study on DSNP's structure-activity relationship, we demonstrate that the DSNP has excellent membrane affinity that is governed by several contributing factors, namely, charge density, type of charge, and particle size, and the best-performing phosphonium-rich DSNP can be used as a membrane-embedded catalyst (MEC) for efficient on-membrane synthesis. Importantly, the DSNP catalyst retains its selectivity toward lipophilic and anionic substrates when working as an MEC for on-membrane ligation. The usefulness of such substrate selectivity and on-membrane catalysis strategy was exemplified with several molecules of interest with low cell permeability and anionic nature, which were successfully transported into eukaryotic cells by after their formation directly on the cell membrane.