A major challenge in the construction of nanomaterials is in synthesizing materials with well defined, homogeneous structures. However nature shows the innate ability to construct diverse bio-nanomaterials through the non-covalent self-assembly of proteins, often yielding homogenous structures that are arranged at the molecular level. Self-assembly of proteins is driven by non-covalent association of short peptide sequences or small molecular surfaces through complementary molecular interactions. Inspired by the bio-specificity of protein/peptide driven assembly, the research presented investigates the use of peptides to construct molecular building blocks (MBB) that provide step-by-step, MBB-by-MBB, control over the bottom up self-assembly of nanostructures. The strategy looks at exploiting coiled coil forming peptide sequences to construct MBBs with two connected faces that are bio-specific and only associate with their designed partners allowing association and assembly when complementary building blocks are added. The results presented here are for the synthetic peptide synthesis of the coiled coil peptides containing non-natural amino acids that allow cross-linking between peptides to produce MBBs and preliminary results for their construction and assembly.

Construction of peptide-based molecular building blocks for the controlled assembly of nanomaterials

2019 Spring National Meeting

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