The Effect of Electrostatic Interactions on the Interfacial Adsorption and Covalent Reaction of Coiled Coil Bundles

Coiled coil bundles (CCBs), known as bundlemers, are a series of computationally designed peptides that self-assemble in water into monodisperse nanoparticles with tunable surface chemistry. We have shown CCB viability as molecular building blocks by producing predesigned 2D lattices, nanocages, and nanotubes through tailoring their surface chemistry and solution assembly conditions. Recently, we have used CCBs as macromonomers to create stiff extremely high aspect ratio supramolecular polymers through covalent chemistry between CCB ends. As the CCB library continues to grow, it's important to develop processing methods to grow new nanostructures out of these versatile building blocks. By first templating a surface through the directed self-assembly of CCBs onto a flat planar substrate, it should be possible to grow CCB nanoforests of highly aligned nanorods with tunable surface chemistry and packing structure. Ongoing work on the formation of the template layer has shown a dependence between deposition kinetics and electrostatic interactions between CCBs. This presentation will overview the impact of pH, ionic strength, and CCB surface charge on deposition kinetics as well as show the stages of CCB deposition through a combination of AFM, QCM-D, and reflectivity measurements.