Cell penetrating peptides have a unique potential for targeted drug delivery. While ATP-driven endocytosis is known to play a major role in their internalization, there has been also ample evidence for the importance of passive translocation for which the direct mechanism, where the peptide is thought to directly pass through the membrane via a temporary pore, has been widely advocated. In this talk, I will question this view and demonstrate that arginine-rich cell penetrating peptides can instead enter vesicles and cells by inducing multilamellarity and fusion, analogously to the action of calcium ions.
Allolio C., Magarkar A., Jurkiewiczf P., Baxová K., Javanainen M., Mason P.E., Sachl R., Cebecauer M., Hof M., Horinek D., Heinz V., Rachel R., Zieglerg C.M., Schrofel A., Jungwirth P.: Arginine-rich cell-penetrating peptides induce membrane multilamellarity and subsequently enter via formation of a fusion pore. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 115 (2018) 11923.