”Bundlemers: A peptide-based macromonomer approach to polymerization”
With the control over molecular assembly, structure, and chemical function, there are nearly endless opportunities for the design and synthesis of arbitrarily complex materials. This concept is readily observed in the structural and functional sophistication found in Nature. For example, with the exact control over the primary sequence of amino acids, Nature designs and builds complex, monodisperse, functional nanostructures, such as proteins and enzymes, through hierarchical assembly. While the control over the primary sequence in synthetic polymers remains a significant challenge, the synthesis of shorter peptides found in the underlying smaller sub-structures employed by Nature, such as alpha helices and beta sheets, is readily achieved using modern synthetic techniques. By leveraging biomolecular structures as functional macromolecular building blocks, a new material with unparalleled structural precision and properties can be realized. This seminar will discuss the concept of implementing synthetic biomolecular assemblies as building blocks for materials design and synthesis. This will include a discussion of recent collaborative efforts between the Kloxin, Pochan, and Saven research groups of combining computational design of peptides with materials synthesis and characterization to create non-biological nanomaterials with new crosslinking and functionalization capabilities. We suggest the coiled coil peptide bundle motif as a fundamental biomolecular building block for nanomaterials synthesis. This so-called ‘bundlemer’ is a monodisperse supramolecular nano-assembly that possesses precise display of highly efficient click functional groups at its periphery for subsequent covalent modification. Copolymerization of bundlemers was shown to create large polymers (>1M g/mol) with surprisingly long persistence lengths (>10s of microns). The bundlemers were also shown to be readily integrated with other materials to create dynamic hydrogel, polymer-peptide conjugates, and intercalated inorganic particles. Ultimately, this approach to materials synthesis enables control of both structure and function, providing a foundation for simple nanomaterials construction for an array of advance materials applications.
