Doctoral Candidate
Materials Science & Engineering

BS, Tsinghua University, 2001 (polymer material & chemical engineering)

Cook Hall 3048
2220 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208-3108

(847) 497-6433 office
(847) 497-6417 lab
(847) 491-3010 facsimile

Email Hongzhou

Hongzhou Jiang

Controlling the Surface Assembly of Peptide Amphiphile Nanofibers

Recently, the self-assembly of peptide amphiphile (PA) molecules into one-dimensional cylindrical nanostructures which are nanometers in diameter and microns in length, with the peptide segment presented on the nanofiber surface, has been explored in our group. Such self-assembly can take place by changing pH, temperature, oxidation/reduction conditions, by adding divalent ions or simply by evaporating the water of aqueous solutions. And our group has shown that different chemical and biological functionalities can be easily grafted onto this platform, exhibiting exceptional properties such as templating the crystallographic orientation in bio-mimetic mineralization and promoting selective differentiation of neuron progenitor cells.

My interest in this area concerns controlling the evaporation-driven self-assembly of PA to create well-defined architectures of nanofibers. Combined with direct or indirect patterning approaches, these evaporation-driven self-assembly provides particularly interesting opportunities in researching the construction of arbitrary peptide nanostructures on surfaces, which might be of great interest in fields such as proteomics, tissue engineering and molecular electronics. Parallel to these patterning efforts, in order to exploit the synergistic effect from assembly of aligned PA nanofibers of high aspect ratio, macroscopic alignment of PA nanofibers has also been pursued. The rational alignment of PAs could bring closer the realization of sensitive biosensors or biological tissue repair, both of which may require a highly ordered presentation of biological ligands.

Figure 1. Tapping Mode Atomic Force Microscopy(TM-AFM) images of PA nanofibers formed by evaporating solvent.

Figure 2. TM-AFM image of a nanofiber array that resembles a “baby face”

References

[1] a) Hartgerink, J. D.; Beniash, E.; Stupp, S. I. Science 2001, 294, 1684-1688. b) Stupp, S. I.; Beniash, E.; Hartgerink, J. D.; Sone, E. D. Bio-Implant Interface 2003 393-406. c) Niece, K. L.; Hartgerink, J. D.; Donners, J. J. J. M.; Stupp, S. I. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2003 125(24), 7146-7147. d) Hartgerink, J. D.; Beniash, E.; Stupp, S. I. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 2002 99(8), 5133-5138.

Publications:

Jiang, H.; Stupp, S. I. "Dip-Pen Patterning and Surface Assembly of Peptide Amphiphiles" Langmuir2005, 21(12) 5242-5246.