Biologically compatible electronic materials will play major roles to bring semiconductor properties to bear on current problems in biosensing and tissue repair.  Unfortunately, the use of organic electronic materials has been very limited relative to traditional inorganics due to perceptions of material degradation or solubility problems.  We developed synthetic approaches to incorporate a wide variety of pi-conjugated functionality into the backbones of water-soluble peptides, such as fluorophores, reactive polymer precursors, and typical n-type and p-type semiconductors.  These molecules self-assemble in aqueous media into 1-D nanomaterials with diameters under 10 nm and lengths of microns.  These materials ultimately lead to the formation of self-supporting hydrogels that can be prepared with either randomly dispersed or globally aligned nanostructure components. In this presentation we will describe the synthesis and optoelectronic characterization of these new nanomaterials using electronic spectroscopy and their integration into functional bioelectronic transistors.  Prospects for using the peptide sequences to elicit biological adhesion or other specific responses will be addressed.

Supramolecular engineering of bioelectronic nanostructures derived from the assembly of pi-conjugated oligopeptides

248th National Meeting (2014)

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