posted on 2014-11-11, 00:00authored byDaniela Mazzier, Marco Maran, Omar Polo Perucchin, Marco Crisma, Mirco Zerbetto, Valerio Causin, Claudio Toniolo, Alessandro Moretto
Self-aggregation has recently emerged
as an efficient tool for the production of well-ordered supramolecular
structures at the nanometric scale. In this framework, peptides offer
important advantages as building blocks because of their biocompatibility
and 3D-structural/functional diversities. The chemical diversity of
peptides may be further expanded by use of noncoded amino acids. In
the present work, we focused our attention on two known photoswitchable
azobenzene-containing α-amino acids and used them as initiators
for the reversible modulation of the cis/trans conformational states of two poly(γ-benzyl-l-glutamate)-based hybrid molecules with either C2 or C3 symmetry. The microscopic
photoresponsive self-assembly of these compounds was examined in detail.
Moreover, these hybrids were exploited in the construction of macroscopic
supramolecular architectures via the electrospinning technique. Finally,
after appropriate thiol functionalization, we fabricated and characterized
dimeric and trimeric gold nanoparticle/polypeptide hybrid systems.