Viral peptide-carbon nanotube recognition.

Abstract

Carbon nanotube has attracted a lot of attention from scientists all over the world as its unique structure provides a wide range of potential applications that can be tapped into. However, there is an issue of obtaining high quality samples of carbon nanotubes as they are usually a mixture of carbon nanotubes with a variety of chirality. Hence, through biopanning, phage display library was used to mix with carbon nanotubes of chirality of (7, 5) and (7, 6). The peptides which bind preferentially to the carbon nanotubes were selected, and then the DNA was extracted and sequenced. It has been found that peptides with higher percentage of histidine and tryptophan binds favourably to (7, 5) chiral carbon nanotubes and peptides with more histidine, tryptophan and tyrosine tend to bind with (7, 6) chiral carbon nanotubes. Thus, it can be seen that carbon nanotubes do exhibit the property of selective affinity with for certain amino acids and peptides especially those containing sp2 hybridization or aromatic rings. However, more work has to be done to find out the exact sequence of peptides that bind preferentially to each chirality of carbon nanotube. When this knowledge is gained, it will be possible to apply it to produce samples of carbon nanotubes with high concentration of a specific chirality and it can also be used in biosensors.