Tobacco Mosaic Virus Coat Protein as a Template for Nanostructured Materials

虽然在过去的十年中，在合成纳米尺寸的组件已经取得了许多进展，这些组件的组装成确定性和可控的模式仍然是该领域的一个主要挑战。需要这种控制来生产具有明确定义和可再现性质的新纳米结构材料。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，研究人员已经着手开发方法，通过这些方法，溶液中的不同组分可以以有序的方式聚集在一起。这个过程被称为自组装，如果组件被正确编码，那么它是非常有效的。该提案的重点是使用生物分子，特别是烟草花叶病毒（TMV）外壳蛋白作为自组装的支架，利用其特异性和多功能性。因此，该研究计划将利用过去25年来在生物技术方面取得的一些重大成就，以指导纳米材料的功能构建。如本提案中所述，将要进行的研究涉及使用TMV作为支架来产生（1）新的磁性纳米结构，（2）在光学或近红外中起作用的超材料的构建块，以及（3）具有新特性的三维介孔整料。

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.