Chemical Synthesis of Water-Soluble Nanoscale Structures

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With support from the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program at the National Science Foundation for this new award, Professor James Nowick, of the Department of Chemistry at University of California- Irvine, will provide a facile bottom-up approach to the creation of water-soluble nanometer scale three-dimensional structures that are based on peptides. Targets include a "sphere", 1.9 nm in diameter, a "tetrahedron", 2.0 nm on edge, and a "cube", 2.3 nm on edge. The structures are based on a family of nanometer-scale amino acids, Abc2K, developed by the principal investigator. These amino acids have already been used to create water-soluble molecular rods up to 10 nanometers in length and water-soluble rings, triangles, and parallelograms up to 3 nanometers in size. These amino acids will be combined with triphenylmethane bridgehead groups to generate bi-, tetra- and hexacyclic three-dimensional structures with well-defined architectures. The principal investigator will also develop a novel kinetic resolution strategy to solve stereochemical problems associated with the syntheses of these structures. NMR spectroscopy in conjunction with molecular modeling and possibly X-ray crystallography will be used to elucidate structural features of these nanometer-scale three-dimensional molecules.With this award, Professor Nowick will demonstrate that peptides are exceptionally easy to synthesize and handle, making them accessible to a wide range of researchers with only access to some simple synthesis equipment, an HPLC, and perhaps an ESI mass spectrometer. Water-soluble structures are especially well suited to biological applications, which certainly represents an important future direction of nanotechnology. The development of these structures will fill an area that is largely missing among nanoscale structures with well-defined geometries, for example, water-soluble peptide structures on a nanometer scale in all three dimensions. Undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students working on this project will be trained to perform cutting-edge research in the laboratory and will also learn to effectively communicate their results to others by presenting their work in seminars, at meetings, and through publication. Students trained on the project will go on to careers in the pharmaceutical or biotechnology industry, or academia, and will thus contribute to the US scientific endeavor and the economy. The nanometer-scale structures that are developed will likely be of widespread interest among scientists and engineers involved in nanotechnology. Information will be disseminated on these structures through publication and seminars and materials will be shared with other researchers where appropriate. Professor Nowick will continue to run the UCI Chemistry Outreach Program, which he created in 1992 to bring the excitement of science to K-12 students and to help reach students in underrepresented groups. The program sends undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students to K-12 schools to make presentations that include lively demonstrations and engaging discussion. Descriptions of the nanometer-scale scale structures, and the associated role of chemistry in nanotechnology, will be incorporated into the discussion.