Combining Rigid Self-Assembling Peptide Rings With Soft Polymers for the Construction of Shape-Defined Hybrid Nanostructures

摘要

Within the area of polymer engineering, we have witnessed strong advances over the last two decades that were driven by the development of a number of 'controlled' polymerization techniques.' Among them atom transfer polymerization has gained large interest due to it's versatility to prepare functional polymers with different chemistries and topologies. Although polymers are now available with polydispersities lower than 1.1, still these materials suffer from structural and compositional inhomogeneities, which limits the control over structure formation at the nanometer scale. To overcome these limitations, synthetic scientists are increasingly being attracted to the design of so-called peptide-protein hybrid materials, where one combines small peptide modules with synthetic polymers to develop materials with pre-defined shapes or improved performance for a specific application.