Materials World Network: Probing in-Vitro Structure-Property-Function Relationships of Ciruses at High-Resolution using Advanced Atomic Force Microscopy Methods

这个材料世界网络项目汇集了普渡大学和西班牙马德里自治大学，共同开发先进的原子力显微镜（AFM）技术，用于研究相关盐水溶液中病毒的高分辨率材料特性。目标是在理解病毒功能或其在医学中的缓解方面取得重大进展，或在将病毒用于医学、纳米复合材料、传感器和纳米电子学的新一代纳米材料的合成方面取得重大进展。所提出的AFM技术使用新颖的多频率技术，如多谐波或双峰AFM，可以提供远超过传统方法的液体成分对比，速度更快，灵敏度更高。提出的工作的理论部分试图从AFM悬臂梁在液体中接触样品的数学模型的数值模拟中提取元模型，以便将观察到的材料对比与局部材料特性的定量测量联系起来。该提案的实验部分将研究噬菌体（phi 29和T7）和真核病毒（小鼠微小病毒和腺病毒）在溶液中衣壳弹性刚度和电荷密度的内在异质性，以及亚表面DNA结构对完全组装的病毒衣壳表面弹性和电荷的影响。目标是在高分辨率下系统地研究DNA包装与衣壳结构之间的联系以及组装病毒的机电特性。对病毒的结构-性能-功能关系的进一步了解不仅对医学和病毒学有广泛的好处，而且对病毒在材料科学和纳米技术中的许多新兴应用也有很大的好处。该项目建议通过纳米中心的网络倡议，与材料和生物物理学社区、AFM行业以及更大的AFM材料社区密切合作，以确保所提议的工作产生广泛的影响。该奖项由材料研究部和国际科学与工程办公室共同资助。

This Materials World Network project brings together Purdue University and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain, to develop advanced Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) techniques for investigating at high-resolution the material properties of viruses in relevant saline solutions. The goal is to enable significant advances in understanding viral function or its mitigation in medicine or in the synthesis of a new generation of nanomaterials using viruses for medicine, nanocomposites, sensors, and nanoelectronics. The proposed AFM techniques use novel multi-frequency techniques such as multi-harmonic or bimodal AFM which can provide compositional contrast in liquids far exceeding conventional methods at much faster speeds and with much greater sensitivity. The theory component of the proposed work attempts to distil metamodels from numerical simulations of mathematical models of AFM cantilevers tapping on samples in liquids, in order to link the observed material contrast to quantitative measures of local material properties. The experimental component of the proposal will investigate the inherent heterogeneities of elastic stiffness and charge density of the capsids of bacteriophages (phi 29 and T7) and eukaryotic viruses (minute virus of mice, and adenovirus) in solution and the influence of sub-surface DNA structure on the surface elasticity and charge of fully assembled viral capsids. The goal is to systematically investigate at high resolution the connection between DNA packing and capsid structure and the electromechanical properties of the assembled virus. An improved understanding of the structure-property-function relationships of viruses would not only broadly benefit medicine and virology, but it would also be a great boon to the many emerging applications of viruses in materials science and nanotechnology.The project proposes to engage strongly with the materials and biophysics communities, AFM industries, and to the larger AFM materials community via cyber-enabled initiatives on the nanohub to ensure a wide ranging impact of the proposed work.This award is co-funded by the Division of Materials Research and the Office of International Science and Engineering.