Understanding biological materials is a major challenge for material scientists. Many of these natural occurring materials have useful properties for employing them as smart materials. Especially ion conducting materials such as biological membranes and ion channels may be used as sensors in a variety of technical applications.However, these complex materials have to be characterized in detail to understand their structure property relationship. A suitable way is the creation of model systems, which enable the selective optimization of their structure and thus their properties. Biologically modified silica-nanopores based on SBA-15 and MCM-41 materials employing different peptides may act as model systems for a better understanding of the structure of ion conducting materials. The combination of 29Si and 13C CP-MAS-NMR techniques provide information on the successful biological modification of the silica pore (figure 1). For a deeper structural understanding 15N MAS-NMR seems to be the method of choice since 15N shifts are strongly influenced by their chemical environment (especially hydrogen bonds). Nevertheless, 15N-NMR suffers from its low intrinsic sensitivity, and thus requires sensitivity enhancement techniques such as Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) to perform these experiments on peptide functionalized material containing 15N in natural abundance. The presentation will demonstrate the developing of proper synthesis strategies for defined peptide silica hybrid materials. This includes a high grafting density of peptides and the proof of covalent bindings. The surface structures are then characterized by a combination of solid state NMR and surface enhanced DNP.

Biofunctionalized silica-nanopores: Synthesis and characterization by solid state CP-MAS-NMR

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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