Short Peptide Amphiphile Cage Facilitate Engineering of Gold Nanoparticles Under the Laser Field

摘要

Engineering of nanomaterials for nanotechnological applications is always in high demand. In this work, we have designed four special classes of short peptide amphiphiles (sPA) consisting hydrophobic palmitoyl tail which is conjugated with ditryptophan unit followed by a nonaromatic acid(s). We observed that variation in head group of sPA according to the hydrophobicity scale provide variation in their self assembly too, therefore used for the engineering of the especial class of metal-organic nanohybrids. The sPA containing highly hydrophobic head exhibit vesicular morphology in organic and aqueous organic solvents and exposure of sunlight to the solution of sPA with Au(III) ions leads to the formation of multishaped AuNPs followed by encapsulation by sPA envelope. The purified gold colliod was further irradiated by continuous wave (CW) laser of 532 nm wavelength which leads to the conversion of multi-shaped AuNPs into uniform shape and size as confirmed by spectroscopic and microscopic investigations. Prolonged irradiation by laser, leads to the plasmonic welding of AuNPs which is mainly guided by sPA envelope produced, nanorods of submicron length. Such template guided laser induced engineering of AuNRs can show the potential applications in the field of nano-medicine, bio-nanotechnology and theranostics.