1. Self-Assembly of Surfactant-like Peptides
Steve S. Santoso, Sylvain Vauthey & Shuguang Zhang
Center for Biomedical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2. Nanostructures Structures ranging from 1 to 100 nm
Sub-micrometer science and engineering that combine multiple disciplines:
Chemistry
Biology
Physics
Material science
Engineering
How to build / design nanostructures?
Want the atomic selectivity of synthetic chemistry yet the expandability of engineering
Molecular self-assembly may be useful

3. Self-assembly processes common in biological systems:
Cell membrane
Multi-component cellular machinery: ribosome
Protein folding
Self-assembly involves non-covalent bonding
van der Waals
hydrogen bonds
dipolar forces
dynamic process

4. Surfactant-like peptides
[Ac]-VVVVVVD
Six hydrophobic valines (tail)
One polar aspartic acid (head)
2 nm

5. Preliminary experiments and results
Some condition screening
Use: dynamic light scattering (DLS), TEM
Found larger structures for some conditions:

6. Cryo-TEM:
300 nm

7. Nanotubes are not the structure with energetic global
minimum:

8. Nanovesicle RF
Controlled delivery of small chemicals
Use nanovesicle to study replication of biological
materials in an enclosed environment

9. 150 nm
550 nm

10. Summary Peptide surfactants are promising substrates for advanced
material and its application.
Cost-effective
Certain structures will form under certain environmental
and chemical conditions
Tunable
Biological origin may be advantageous for medical application
A good system to study self-assembly.