Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2011
Volume 56, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 21–25, 2011; Dallas, Texas
Abstract: S1.00073 : Hierarchical self-assembly of spider silk-like block copolymers
Author:
Block copolymers provide an attractive venue to study well-defined
nano-structures that self-assemble to generate functionalized
nano- and
mesoporous materials. In the present study, a novel family of spider
silk-like block copolymers was designed, bioengineered and
characterized to
study the impact of sequence chemistry, secondary structure and
block length
on assembled morphology. Genetic variants of native spider
dragline silk
(major ampullate spidroin I, Nephila clavipes) were used as
polymer building
blocks. Characterization by FTIR revealed increased ?-sheet
content with
increasing hydrophobic A blocks; SEM revealed spheres, rod-like
structures,
bowl-shaped and giant compound micelles. Langmuir Blodgett
monolayers were
prepared at the air-water interface at different surface
pressures and
monolayer films analyzed by AFM revealed oblate to prolate
structures.
Circular micelles, rod-like, densely packed circular structures were
observed for HBA6 at increasing surface pressure. Exploiting
hierarchical
assembly provide a promising approach to rationale designs of
protein block
copolymer systems, allowing comparison to traditional synthetic
systems.
To cite this abstract, use the following reference: http://meetings.aps.org/link/BAPS.2011.MAR.S1.73
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