A Multi-Spectroscopic Investigation of Protein Structure in Biosilica Composites

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With this award, the Chemistry of Life Processes Program is funding a collaboration between the solid state NMR (ssNMR) group of Gary Drobny at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and the optical spectroscopy group of Tobias Weidner at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, Germany. The NSF will be funding the U.S. team and the Deutsche Forshungsgemeinshaft will be funding the German team. This collaboration is aimed at elucidating to high resolution, the structures of proteins and peptides in biosilica composites. Not only will this research provide an atomic level structural picture of how proteins structure when in contact with silica, but the information will be helpful in understanding how biogenic silica is modeled into elaborate macroscopic structures under relatively mild conditions compared to the extreme conditions (high temperatures, pressures etc.) that are involved in the production and manipulation of anthropogenic silica.There are potential long term goal implications of these collaborative studies toward understanding the nature of an important problem in chemical biology; namely peptide-silica interactions and the roles played by peptide secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure as well as amino acid modifications in controlling the morphology of biosilica composites. These approaches will develop further a set of spectroscopic techniques for structurally characterizing proteins as they exist in other types of biomineral composites. The interdisciplinary and international nature of the collaboration is expected to be beneficial for both the U.S. scientists funded by the NSF and the German scientists funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinshaft.