Plant virus hybrid materials based on tobacco mosaic virus and small organic cross-linkers

There is an increasing interest in the application of Michael addition reactions, which makes it possible to obtain simply and highly effective new materials at environmentally friendly conditions. This study employed this method to obtain tobacco mosaic virus (TMV)-based hybrid materials as interesting precursors for different applications. Therefore, the authors investigated the linker-enabled coupling of a cysteine-exposing mutant TMV_Cys nanorod that displays a thiol group on each of its 2130 protein subunits. These can undergo a thiol-Michael reaction with corresponding functional groups of different linkers to form several types of coupling products. The linkers varied in their central aryl or heteroaryl unit, the spacer length with different amounts of CH₂ groups and the respective functional groups such as methacrylamide, acrylamide and maleimide. It could be shown that not only the reactivity of the Michael acceptor plays an important role in product formation but also the linker length and the composition of the core group.