Fabrication of One- and Two-Dimensional Gold Nanoparticle Arrays on Computationally Designed Self-Assembled Peptide Templates

Templating methods, combined with colloidal chemistry synthesis, provide a strategy to fabricate inorganic nanomaterials with controllable architectures. Computationally designed peptide assemblies allow fine control of templated nanomaterial architecture and morphology. Computationally designed peptide sequences, which can self-assemble into peptide nanotubes and peptide platelets, are modified with cysteine amino acids for the purpose of gold nanoparticle templating. The resulting gold nanoparticles exhibit clear one-dimensional and two-dimensional interparticle organizations due to the templating effect of the peptide assemblies. The self-assembly of the computationally designed peptides proceeds via controlled, kinetic pathways that allow manipulation of final peptide assembly nanostructure. As a result of the assembly process, the peptides in different assembled states can be used to control the organization of gold nanoparticles. This work demonstrates a new use of computationally designed peptide assemblies for inorganic nanomaterials construction.