(510f) Surface Mineralization of Barley Stripe Mosaic Virus Biotemplates

Nanoscale materials are of a considerable interest in applications such as catalysis, sensing, and electronics. Biotemplates featuring tunable functional biomolecules provide hierarchical, controlled patterned nanostructure of high precision. The use of viral protein as biotemplate offers diversity of architecture with genetic/chemical tunability which creates morphology of precise dimension. Barley stripe mosaic virus virus-like particle (BSMV-VLP) has been designed and engineered to overcome the limitations related to viral genomic replication and plant-based production. The BSMV-VLPs produced via bacterial-based expression platform facilitate processing cycle for large-scale production. Uniform palladium coatings were synthesized on the BSMV-VLPs without an additional reducing agent. Our recent focus is to investigate the surface mineralization of BSMV virion produced from infected barley plants. The hydrothermal synthesis will be employed on BSMV and BSMV-VLP to create uniform and dense monometallic and bimetallic coatings. The synthesized metallic nanorods were imaged with transmission electron microscope (TEM). Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) were used for elemental composition characterization. We have shown an effective and tunable approach for metallic nanorod deposition on biotemplates produced from different routes using hydrothermal solution synthesis. In summary, this synthetic approach has expanded the synthetic toolbox and broadened the possibilities in bottom-up processing of versatile and robust nanostructure and would expedite future industrial applications.