Selective preference of engineered peptides for aluminum alloy

Bacterial cell surface display technology offers a powerful tool for the discovery and study of peptide–material interactions offering the potential toward tailoring the interaction and tuning the properties of multicomponent materials for future military and commercial systems. With bacterial cell surface display technology, a large diverse library containing billions of peptide material variants is encoded directly into the bacterial DNA, resulting in a self-sustaining and replicating population that can easily be propagated without requiring elution from the target. Recently, this method was extended to genetically engineered peptides for inorganics: specifically to a bulk aluminum alloy. In this paper, we further investigate the binding interaction of this peptide material including a study of relative binding to aluminum, glass, copper and brass. The surface display peptide exhibited more than 2 order of magnitude greater binding to the aluminum alloy compared to the glass sample, and little to no interaction with copper and brass. These results highlight, for the first time, the potential for selection interaction of genetically engineered peptides using the eCPX construct with inorganic materials and open the possibility for biohybrid materials and systems of the future.