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Science 9 January 2004:
Vol. 303. no. 5655, pp. 213 - 217
DOI: 10.1126/science.1092740
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Reports

Virus-Based Toolkit for the Directed Synthesis of Magnetic and Semiconducting Nanowires

Chuanbin Mao,1* Daniel J. Solis,4* Brian D. Reiss,5 Stephen T. Kottmann,4 Rozamond Y. Sweeney,2 Andrew Hayhurst,2 George Georgiou,2,3 Brent Iverson,1,2 Angela M. Belcher5{dagger}

We report a virus-based scaffold for the synthesis of single-crystal ZnS, CdS, and freestanding chemically ordered CoPt and FePt nanowires, with the means of modifying substrate specificity through standard biological methods. Peptides (selected through an evolutionary screening process) that exhibit control of composition, size, and phase during nanoparticle nucleation have been expressed on the highly ordered filamentous capsid of the M13 bacteriophage. The incorporation of specific, nucleating peptides into the generic scaffold of the M13 coat structure provides a viable template for the directed synthesis of semiconducting and magnetic materials. Removal of the viral template by means of annealing promoted oriented aggregation-based crystal growth, forming individual crystalline nanowires. The unique ability to interchange substrate-specific peptides into the linear self-assembled filamentous construct of the M13 virus introduces a material tunability that has not been seen in previous synthetic routes. Therefore, this system provides a genetic toolkit for growing and organizing nanowires from semiconducting and magnetic materials.

1 Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Texas (UT) at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
2 Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas (UT) at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
3 Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Texas (UT) at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
4 Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA 02139–4307, USA.
5 Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering Division, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA 02139–4307, USA.



* These authors contributed equally to this work.

{dagger} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: belcher{at}mit.edu

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