Fig. 3: Stable delivery of peptide coacervates to mouse and human cells and clinically relevant cell types.

A Fluorescence images of coacervate uptake in cell lines. 30 µl of HBpep particles assembled at 1 mg/mL or 30 µl HBpep-SA particles assembled at 0.5 mg/mL were added to the cell media for human osteosarcoma line U2OS, B16-F10 murine melanoma cells, and primary human monocytes. Green: FITC labeled condensates. Red: Abcam Cytopainter Cell Membrane Staining. Blue: Nucleus, stained DNA (DAPI). Scale bar: 10 µm. B and D Quantification of size and number of coacervate taken up per cells; for formulations of 20 µl 0.2 mg/mL or 10 µl 2 mg/mL HBpep-SA delivered to U2OS; following particles over the course of 5 days. For coacervate size quantification, n = 255, 108, 19 for 0.2 mg/mL from Day1 to Day5 and n = 364, 400, 258 for 2 mg/mL from Day1 to Day5. For coacervate number per cell quantification, cell number n = 10. Error bars indicate standard deviation from mean. Center of error bars indicate the mean. Brown–Forsythe and Welch One-Way ANOVA tests were used. Dunnett T3 statistical hypothesis is used to correct for multiple comparisons. NS indicates not significant (P > 0.05), *P ≤ 0.05, **P ≤ 0.01, ***P ≤ 0.001 and ****P ≤ 0.0001. Adjusted p value is 0.0389, 0.0006, 0.0024 for (B) and 0.9365, 0.1850, 0.4135 for (D). C Fluorescence images of U2OS cells with particles at day 1 and day 5. Scale bar: 10 µm. E Quantification of the number of large coacervates (diameter > 2 µm) per cell compared to smaller ones (diameter <2 µm) for particles assembled at 2 mg/mL and 0.2 mg/mL HBpep-SA. The number of cells used for quantification per group, n = 10. Error bars indicate the standard deviation from mean. Center of error bars indicate the mean. NS indicates not significant (P > 0.05), *P ≤ 0.05, **P ≤ 0.01, ***P ≤ 0.001 and ****P ≤ 0.0001. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.