Designer Peptide Dendrons and Dendrimers Based Soft Materials Through Self-Assembly

摘要

A series of new aspartic and glutamic acid based peptide den- drons and dendrimers were designed and synthesized. The supramolecular assembly of these novel molecules were stud- ied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force micro- scopy (AFM), and attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy. The dendrons and dendrimers formed gel in aqueous or in organic phase with excellent stor- age modulus as measured by rheometry. Glutamic acid-based higher generation dendrons and dendrimers showed a mini- mum gelation concentration as low as 1 wt/v (%) in CHCl_3.In- terestingly, the higher generation dendrimers 5d, 6d, and 7d gelated even polar solvent DMSO. The lipidated peptide den- drons showed thermotropic liquid crystalline behavior with the formation of columnar and smectic phase as confirmed by dif- ferential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and polarization optical microscopy (POM). These lipidated peptides exhibited well-or- dered specific modes of self-assembly and hence could be ex- ploited for several applications such as drug delivery vehicles and in tissue engineering.