Genes within bottles. Synergism between simulation and experiment in designing nanovectors for DNA/RNA delivery

Due to their relative easy synthesis and commercial availability, nanovectors based on dendrimers and dendrons are among the most utilized non-viral vectors for gene transfer. Concomitantly, recent advances in molecular simulations and computer architectures not only allow for accurate predictions of many structural, energetical, and eventual self-assembly features of these nanocarriers per se, but are able to yield fundamental information about the interactions of these nanovectors with their nucleic acid cargoes at a molecular level. In this work, we aim at reviewing some of our own efforts in the field of multiscale molecular modeling of these fascinating materials. This review is written by computational scientists for experimental scientists, with the specific purpose of illustrating the potentiality of these methodologies and the usefulness of multiscale molecular modeling as an innovative and complementary tool in their current research.