"If you have a soap film and you poke it with a bubble wand, you'll pop it. But if you coat the bubble wand with soap before poking the film, it will pass through the film without popping it because it's coated with the same material," he said.
According to Stellacci, the coated nanoparticles have properties similar to the cell membrane, not identical, but the analogy is still apt.
Stellacci, who first reported the creation of the striped nanoparticles in a 2004 Nature Materials paper, said: "(At the time), we noticed that they interacted with proteins in an interesting way."
"Could they also have interesting interactions with cells?" was the question they had yet to determine at the time.
The researcher now says that he and his colleagues have found the answer to that question in the affirmative.
Source-ANI
RAS/L