Tobacco Mosaic Virus Coat Protein as a Template for Nanostructured Materials

尽管在过去的十年里，在合成纳米元件方面取得了许多进展，但将这些元件组装成确定和可控的图案仍然是该领域的主要挑战。这种控制是生产新的纳米结构材料所必需的，这些材料具有明确的和可重复的特性。由于在这种长度尺度上“自上而下”地操纵材料是有问题的，或者是不可能的，研究人员已经着手开发方法，通过这种方法，溶液中的不同成分可以有序地聚集在一起。这个被称为自组装的过程是非常有效的，只要组件被适当地编码来这样做。**这项建议侧重于使用生物分子，特别是烟草花叶病毒(TMV)外壳蛋白作为自组装的支架，利用它们的特异性和多功能性。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。如本提案所述，将开展的研究包括使用TMV作为支架来生成(1)新的磁性纳米结构，(2)用于光学或近红外的超材料的构建块，以及(3)具有新特性的三维介孔整体。

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.