Tobacco Mosaic Virus Coat Protein as a Template for Nanostructured Materials

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Although there have been many advances in the last decade in synthesizing nanosized components, the assembly of these components into deterministic and controllable patterns remains a major challenge in the field. Such control is required to produce new nanostructured materials that have well-defined and reproducible properties. Because "top-down" manipulation of materials on this length scale is either problematic or impossible, researchers have set out to develop methods by which different components in solution can come together in an ordered fashion. This process, termed self assembly, is very efficient provided the components are properly encoded to do so. This proposal focuses on using biomolecules, specifically Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) coat proteins as scaffolds for self-assembly, taking advantage of their specificity and versatility. The research program will thus exploit some of the significant achievements in biotechnology made over the last 25 years, in order to direct the functional construction of nanomaterials. The research to be undertaken, as described in this proposal, involves the use of TMV as a scaffold to generate (1) new magnetic nanostructures, (2) building blocks for metamaterials that function in the optical or near-IR, and (3) three-dimensional mesoporous monoliths with new properties.