Design and Growth of Bundlemer Brushes

Bundlemers are discrete, rigid 4nm x 2nm cylindrical nanoparticles assembled in water from computationally designed peptides. More specifically, bundlemers are homotetrameric, anti-parallel coiled coils with a hydrophobic core buried in the center of the coiled coil cylinder nanoparticle and hydrophilic and polar groups populating the surface. These hydrophilic and polar surface amino acid side chains are highly tunable. We have previously used this tunability to design bundlemers that self-assemble into different preprogrammed 2-D lattices as well as covalently link bundlemers in a step growth like reaction into high aspect ratio rigid rods with similar dimensions and rigidity to single wall carbon nanotubes. In this talk I will discuss how we can leverage this tunability to design and control bundlemer binding to inorganic colloids. By balancing the surface charge of bundlemer nanoparticles with substrate binding terminal residues, we can design bundlemers to bind to nanoparticles with a preferred orientation. We can then leverage this interfacial ordering to design complex nanostructured coatings called bundlemer brushes. We then characterize these coating through a combination of dynamic light scattering, transmission electron microscopy, UV/Vis and FTIR spectroscopy.