Tobacco Mosaic Virus Coat Protein as a Template for Nanostructured Materials

虽然在过去的十年中在合成纳米组件方面取得了许多进展，但将这些组件组装成确定和可控的模式仍然是该领域的主要挑战。这种控制是生产具有明确定义和可重复性能的新型纳米结构材料所必需的。由于在这种长度尺度上对材料进行“自上而下”的操作要么是有问题的，要么是不可能的，研究人员已经开始开发方法，通过这种方法，溶液中的不同成分可以以有序的方式聚集在一起。这个过程，称为自组装，是非常有效的，只要组件被适当地编码。

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.