Inspired by peptide- and protein-controlled formation of hierarchically-structured biominerals (e.g. bones and teeth) in nature, many biomimetic approaches have been developed for the preparation of nanostructured inorganic-organic hybrid materials. These approaches are attractive because they generate complex, functional nanomaterials under mild aqueous synthetic conditions. The unique integration of bio- and inorganic nanomaterials has demonstrated superior performance. Despite the advances in developing biomimetic approaches, the rules of designing sequence-defined molecules that lead to the predictable synthesis of inorganic nanomaterials are unknown. Herein we report the design of sequence-defined peptoids for controlled synthesis of well-defined plasmonic nanomaterials. By engineering peptoid sequences and investigating resulting particle formation mechanisms, we developed a rule of thumb for designing peptoids that predictively enabled the morphological evolution from spherical to nanocoral-shaped metallic nanoparticles. We demonstrate that the individual nanocoral-shaped gold particles exhibit a plasmonic enhancement as high as 10<sup>5 </sup>fold. This research significantly advances our ultimate vision of predictive bio-inspired hybrid materials synthesis using sequence-defined synthetic molecules that mimic proteins and peptides.

Designing amphiphilic peptoids for bio-inspired synthesis of hybrid materials

2019 Spring National Meeting

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