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- Title
Protein nanowires with tunable functionality and programmable self-assembly using sequence-controlled synthesis.
- Authors
Shapiro, Daniel Mark; Mandava, Gunasheil; Yalcin, Sibel Ebru; Arranz-Gibert, Pol; Dahl, Peter J.; Shipps, Catharine; Gu, Yangqi; Srikanth, Vishok; Salazar-Morales, Aldo I.; O'Brien, J. Patrick; Vanderschuren, Koen; Vu, Dennis; Batista, Victor S.; Malvankar, Nikhil S.; Isaacs, Farren J.
- Abstract
Advances in synthetic biology permit the genetic encoding of synthetic chemistries at monomeric precision, enabling the synthesis of programmable proteins with tunable properties. Bacterial pili serve as an attractive biomaterial for the development of engineered protein materials due to their ability to self-assemble into mechanically robust filaments. However, most biomaterials lack electronic functionality and atomic structures of putative conductive proteins are not known. Here, we engineer high electronic conductivity in pili produced by a genomically-recoded E. coli strain. Incorporation of tryptophan into pili increased conductivity of individual filaments >80-fold. Computationally-guided ordering of the pili into nanostructures increased conductivity 5-fold compared to unordered pili networks. Site-specific conjugation of pili with gold nanoparticles, facilitated by incorporating the nonstandard amino acid propargyloxy-phenylalanine, increased filament conductivity ~170-fold. This work demonstrates the sequence-defined production of highly-conductive protein nanowires and hybrid organic-inorganic biomaterials with genetically-programmable electronic functionalities not accessible in nature or through chemical-based synthesis. Bacterial hairs called pili become highly-conductive electric wires upon addition of both natural and synthetic amino acids conjugated with gold nanoparticles. Here the authors use computationally-guided ordering further increasing their conductivity, thus yielding genetically-programmable materials.
- Subjects
NANOWIRES; ATOMIC structure; ESCHERICHIA coli; ELECTRIC wire; ELECTRIC wiring; PROTEINS
- Publication
Nature Communications, 2022, Vol 13, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2041-1723
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41467-022-28206-x