NER: Exploration of a Method for Designing Protein Nanomaterials

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Considerable effort in nanotechnology research has been devoted to creating new molecular materials from inorganic or organic building blocks. These efforts have led to numerous new inorganic and organic materials with length scales generally in the 1-10 nm range (1,000,000nm=1mm). Biology offers a special opportunity to develop new materials on the next larger length scale. Because of their scale and composition, biological macromolecules could be especially suited to designing materials for biological applications. Exciting progress has been reported recently in the use of DNA to direct the assembly of nanomaterials, but a general method for using proteins to direct the assembly of nanomaterials has not emerged yet. The present project will explore and develop a new approach to protein design in which novel proteins are created by fusing together various natural oligomeric protein components. When the separate protein components are fused together under certain geometric rules, the newly designed proteins should self-associate and give rise to a vast array of new assemblies and nanomaterials with sizes and length scales in the 5-30 nm range. The approach is based on the principles of symmetry and, owing to its generality, can produce a wide variety of architectures, including cages, filaments, and extended two-dimensional and three-dimensional arrays. The long-term future applications of these protein-based materials include: synthetic vaccines, molecular delivery vehicles, biosensors, filtration devices, substrates for ultra-high density molecular display (e.g. of DNA molecules), and templates for deposition of more traditional conducting or semiconducting materials.