Hydrogels prepared from self-assembling peptides are promising materials for medical applications, and using both l- and d-peptide isomers in a gel’s formulation provides an intuitive way to control the proteolytic degradation of an implanted material. In the course of developing gels for delivery applications, we discovered that a racemic mixture of the mirror-image β-hairpin peptides, named MAX1 and DMAX1, provides a fibrillar hydrogel that is four times more rigid than gels formed by either peptide alone—a puzzling observation. Herein, we use transmission electron microscopy, small angle neutron scattering, solid state NMR, diffusing wave, infrared, and fluorescence spectroscopies, and modeling to determine the molecular basis for the increased mechanical rigidity of the racemic gel. We find that enantiomeric peptides coassemble in an alternating fashion along the fibril long axis, forming an extended heterochiral pleat-like β-sheet, a structure predicted by Pauling and Corey in 1953. Hydrogen bonding between enantiomers within the sheet dictates the placement of hydrophobic valine side chains in the fibrils’ dry interior in a manner that allows the formation of nested hydrophobic interactions between enantiomers, interactions not accessible within enantiomerically pure fibrils. Importantly, this unique molecular arrangement of valine side chains maximizes inter-residue contacts within the core of the fibrils resulting in their local stiffening, which in turn, gives rise to the significant increase in bulk mechanical rigidity observed for the racemic hydrogel.

Most, if not all, peptide-and protein-based hydrogels formed by self-assembly can be characterized as kinetically trapped 3D networks of fibrils. The propensity of disease-associated amyloidforming peptides and proteins to assemble into polymorphic fibrils suggests that cross-β fibrils comprising hydrogels may also be polymorphic. We use solid-state NMR to determine the molecular and supramolecular structure of MAX1, a de novo designed gelforming peptide, in its fibrillar state. We find that MAX1 adopts a β-hairpin conformation and self-assembles with high fidelity into a double-layered cross-β structure. Hairpins assemble with an in-register Syn orientation within each β-sheet layer and with an Anti orientation between layers. Surprisingly, although the MAX1 fibril network is kinetically trapped, solid-state NMR data show that fibrils within this network are monomorphic and most likely represent the thermodynamic ground state. Intermolecular interactions not available in alternative structural arrangements apparently dictate this monomorphic behavior.M AX1 is a 20-residue peptide designed de novo to fold into an amphiphilic β-hairpin that self-assembles to form a fibrillar network within a self-supporting hydrogel (1). The MAX1 gel exhibits shear thin-recovery rheological behavior (2), is cytocompatible toward mammalian cells, yet is inherently antimicrobial (3) and thus has applications in tissue engineering and drug delivery. In addition to exploring the utility of the gel, we seek to understand the mechanism of gelation, the macroscale morphology of its fibrillar network, and the underlying molecular structure of its fibrils.MAX1 contains two segments of alternating lysine and valine residues, connected by a four-residue turn-forming segment. When initially dissolved in water, electrostatic repulsions among protonated lysine sidechains lead to an ensemble of monomeric random coil conformations (1). Peptide folding and self-assembly, leading to gelation (Fig. 1), can be triggered by attenuating electrostatic repulsions, by adjusting the solution pH and/or ionic strength. Increasing the solution temperature also drives hydrophobic collapse of valine sidechains, further favoring MAX1 assembly. According to circular dichroism (1), cryo-transmission electron microscopy (TEM) (4), small-angle neutron scattering (5), and dynamic light scattering coupled with rheological measurements (4), soon after the triggering event, peptides assemble into branched clusters of β-sheet-rich, semiflexible nanofibrils throughout the solution. Individual clusters contain dangling fibril ends that grow and interpenetrate neighboring clusters as the network evolves. Multiple particle tracking microrheology shows that the time at which the fibril network percolates the entire sample volume, defining the gel point, is less than 1 min at 1% (wt/vol) peptide (6). In this mechanism of gelation, the growing fibrils become kinetically trapped in the evolving network as they percolate the sample volume. Fibrils do not precipitate, but rather ...

We report an approach that extends the applicability of ultrasensitive force-gradient detection of magnetic resonance to samples with spin-lattice relaxation times (T 1 ) as short as a single cantilever period. To demonstrate the generality of the approach, which relies on detecting either cantilever frequency or phase, we used it to detect electron spin resonance from a T 1 = 1 ms nitroxide spin probe in a thin film at 4.2 K and 0.6 T. By using a custom-fabricated cantilever with a 4 μm-diameter nickel tip, we achieve a magnetic resonance sensitivity of 400 Bohr magnetons in a 1 Hz bandwidth. A theory is presented that quantitatively predicts both the lineshape and the magnitude of the observed cantilever frequency shift as a function of field and cantilever-sample separation. Good agreement was found between nitroxide T 1 's measured mechanically and inductively, indicating that the cantilever magnet is not an appreciable source of spin-lattice relaxation here. We suggest that the new approach has a number of advantages that make it well suited to push magnetic resonance detection and imaging of nitroxide spin labels in an individual macromolecule to single-spin sensitivity.MRFM | ESR | TEMPAMINE | mechanically detected magnetic resonance | molecular structure imaging A generally applicable approach for determining the tertiary structure of an individual macromolecule in vitro at angstrom or subangstrom resolution would create exciting opportunities for answering many longstanding questions in molecular biology. For macromolecules too large to characterize by NMR or X-ray diffraction, the tertiary structure of proteins (1-3), nucleic acids (4, 5), and biomolecular assemblies (6, 7) can be explored by using inductively-detected electron spin resonance (ESR) to measure distances between pairs of attached spin labels (2-5, 7, 8). These studies, however, require bulk quantities of sample (9) and demand multiple experiments with spin labels attached to different locations in the target macromolecule. Mechanical detection and imaging of single-electron spins has been demonstrated, in E centers in gamma-irradiated quartz (10), and it is natural to explore applying magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) (11-15) to map the locations of individual spin labels attached to a single biomacromolecule.The ultimate limit of imaging resolution in MRFM is set by the intrinsic linewidth of the resonance and the applied magnetic field gradient. For a 0.1 mT homogeneous linewidth, typical of the organic radical studied here, a gradient of 4 × 10 6 T/m allows selective excitation of individual spin labels only 0.025 nm apart. A magnetic field gradient this large has recently been demonstrated in an MRFM experiment by using ferromagnetic pillars fabricated by electron-beam lithography (15). The force sensitivity required to detect single electrons in this gradient is 40 aN, above the minimum detectable force (in 1 Hz bandwidth) of 5 − 10 aN reported for a high-compliance cantilever operated with its metalized leading edge above ...