(637e) Peptide Engineering for Bio-Inspired Zinc Oxide Materials

Recent advance in biotechnology enables us to find the peptides with affinity for nonbiological materials and with function of mineralizing inorganic materials. The use of the functional peptides is attracting a growing interest for bottom-up fabrication approaches of nanoscale devise. Zinc oxide (ZnO), a semiconductor with a wide direct band gap, possess unique optical, acoustic, and electronic properties, so that it is one of most widely studied metal oxides for solar cells, ultra violet nanolaser, blue light-emitting diode and so on. This wide variety of applications requires various fabrications of morphologically and functionally distinct ZnO nanostructures. Here, the peptide which can bind the ZnO particle but not ZnS and Eu2O3 particles, is innovated, and further, the ZnO-binding peptide selectively catalyzes the synthesis of a highly anisotropic ZnO particle from a Zn(OH)2 solution at room temperature. We describe the immobilization and mineralization of ZnO using the artificial peptide with affinity for ZnO at room temperature, and show the unique assembly of the ZnO nanoparticles to flower-type morphologies by the peptide.