Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
J Am Chem Soc. 2010 Nov 10;132(44):15632-6. doi: 10.1021/ja104373e.
In the world of biology, "self-assembly" is the ability of biological entities to interact with one another to form supramolecular structures. One basic group of self-assembled structures is peptide nanotubes (PNTs). However, the self-assembly mechanism, with its special characteristics, is not yet fully understood. An exceptional quantum-confined approach is shown here for the self-assembly mechanism in bio-inspired materials. We found the elementary building block of the studied PNT, which is self-assembled from short peptides composed of two phenylalanine residues, to be 0D-quantum-confined (can be related to confinement in 3D), also called a quantum dot (QD). This elementary building block can further self-assemble to a PNT formation. It has been observed that the assembly process of dots to tubes and the disassembly process of tubes to dots are reversible. We further show that a similar dipeptide can also self-assemble to a QD-like structure, with different dimensions. The presented peptide QD structures are nanometer-sized structures, with pronounced exciton effects, which may promote the use of an entirely new kind of organic QDs.
在生物学领域，“自组装”是指生物实体相互作用形成超分子结构的能力。一类基本的自组装结构是肽纳米管（PNT）。然而，其具有特殊特性的自组装机制尚未完全被理解。本文展示了一种特殊的量子限制方法，用于研究生物启发材料中的自组装机制。我们发现，由两个苯丙氨酸残基组成的短肽自组装形成的所研究的 PNT 的基本构建块是 0D-量子限制的（可以与 3D 限制相关），也称为量子点（QD）。这个基本构建块可以进一步自组装成 PNT 形成。已经观察到，点到管的组装过程和管到点的拆卸过程是可逆的。我们进一步表明，类似的二肽也可以自组装成具有不同维度的类似 QD 的结构。所提出的肽 QD 结构是具有明显激子效应的纳米级结构，这可能促进使用全新的有机 QD。
