Sustainable and functional nanomaterials from peptide self-assembly

在自然界中，复杂的材料和结构是通过自组装形成的，这是一个化学上简单的构建块形成复杂的生物分子阵列的过程，这些生物分子在生命系统中协同工作。这一现象激发了持续的研究努力，以阐明管理自组装的基本物理原理和从这一过程中出现的结构的性质。一个特别令人兴奋的应用领域是能够从生物来源和可生物降解的肽构建单元产生新型材料。该项目将侧重于三个关键主题：-定制自组装过程，以产生潜在的技术上有用的材料。我们可以通过使用微流体来控制微尺度架构以生成微胶囊或具有光子活性或结构颜色的结构来实现这一点。至关重要的是，我们可以通过依赖生物和生物衍生肽构建块的新超分子组装并利用非共价相互作用在空间中组织构建块来实现这些特性，而不影响材料的生物降解性。了解肽自组装发生的基本过程以及如何影响它。最近一个特别令人兴奋的研究领域是探索和利用液-液相分离作为前体，以帮助特定形态形成肽物质。使用肽结构作为矿化和募集无机成分的支架。这种策略被许多生物有机体利用来产生高度耐用的材料，并且可以在人工环境中使用完全可生物降解的材料，例如二氧化硅，一种天然存在的丰富矿物质。

In nature, sophisticated materials and structures are formed through self-assembly, a process where chemically simple building blocks form complex arrays of biomolecules functioning cooperatively in living systems. This phenomenon has inspired a sustained research effort to elucidate the basic physical principles which govern self-assembly and the nature of the structures that emerge from this process. A particularly exciting area of application is the ability to generate new types of materials from biologically sourced and biodegradable peptide building blocks. The project will focus on three key themes:- Tailoring the self-assembly process to generate potentially technologically useful materials. We can achieve this by using microfluidics to control the micro scale architectures to generate microcapsules, or structures with photonic activity or structural colour. Crucially we can achieve these properties without affecting the biodegradability of the materials by relying on new supra-molecular assemblies of biological and biologically-derived peptide building blocks and utilising non-covalent interactions to organise the building blocks in space.- Understanding the fundamental processes which peptide self-assembly takes place and how it can be influenced. A particularly exciting recent area of research is exploring and exploiting liquid-liquid phase separation as a precursor to help nucleate specific morphologies form peptide species.- Using peptide structures as scaffolds for mineralisation and recruiting inorganic components. This strategy is exploited by many biological organisms to generate highly robust materials and can be implemented in an artificial setting with fully biodegradable materials such as silica, an abundant mineral that occurs naturally.