Determining the orientation and conformation of an adsorbed biomolecule at an inorganic interface remains a grand challenge in studies of interest to materials science, medicine and biotechnology. Lack of a general approach, either computational or experimental, to study structure thermodynamics and kinetics of the bio/nano interface, advances in the field are often left to chance discovery vs detailed mechanistic understanding. Throughout this seminar I will present recent advances from our group in fundamental science and engineering of interfacial phenomena of complex peptides.
The talk will present computational methods for determining the structure and thermodynamics of a bound peptide, experimental validation of the accuracy of the methods, and a series of examples of increasing complexity including titania binding peptides, proteins involved in the mineralization of bone and integration of implants, and synthetic peptides that are used to create hybrid bio/nano structures for hierarchical and multifunctional materials.
