Toward enzyme-responsive polymersome drug delivery.

In drug delivery, enzyme-responsive drug carriers are becoming increasingly relevant because of the growing association of disease pathology with enzyme overexpression. Polymersomes are of interest to such applications because of their tunable properties. While polymersomes open up a wide range of chemical and physical properties to explore, they also present a challenge in developing generalized rules for the synthesis of novel systems.

Less Noble or More Noble: How Strain Affects the Binding of Oxygen on Gold.

Many heterogeneous catalysts exploit strained active layers to modulate reactivity and/or selectivity. It is therefore significant that density functional theory, as well as experimental approaches, find that tensile strain makes the gold surface more binding for oxygen, in other words, less noble. We show that this behavior does not apply when re-structuring of the gold surface is allowed to occur simultaneously with the adsorption of oxygen.