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Summary: Template-Directed Assembly of a de Novo Designed Protein
Christina L. Brown,, Ilhan A. Aksay,,§ Dudley A. Saville,§ and Michael H. Hecht*,,
Department of Chemistry, Princeton Materials Institute, and Department of Chemical Engineering,
Princeton UniVersity, Princeton, New Jersey 08544
Received March 7, 2002
A number of biological materials owe their unusual structural
characteristics and mechanical properties to long-range order
induced by the lamination of -sheet proteins between layers of
inorganic mineral.1 In such composites, both the protein layer and
the mineral layer adopt structures different from those they assume
in isolation. Interactions between such layers and the ordered
structures that result from these interactions enable nature to produce
biomaterials that are simultaneously hard, strong, and tough.
With the long-term goal of constructing artificial biomaterials
with laminated structures, we developed a biomimetic system using
a highly ordered surface to template the assembly of a de noVo
designed -sheet protein. The surface used is highly ordered
pyrolytic graphite (HOPG), which forms individual crystallite
domains extending over several microns.2 The graphite lattice is
hexagonal; therefore structures templated by HOPG are expected
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