Identification of Novel Short BaTiO₃-Binding/Nucleating Peptides for Phage-Templated in Situ Synthesis of BaTiO₃ Polycrystalline Nanowires at Room Temperature

Abstract

Ferroelectric materials, such as tetragonal barium titanate (BaTiO3), have been widely used in a variety of areas including bioimaging, biosensing, and high power switching devices. However, conventional methods for the synthesis of tetragonal phase BaTiO3 usually require toxic organic reagents and high temperature treatments, and are thus not environment-friendly and energy-efficient. Here, we took advantage of the phage display technique to develop a novel strategy for the synthesis of BaTiO3 nanowires. We identified a short BaTiO3-binding/nucleating peptide, CRGATPMSC (named RS), from a phage-displayed random peptide library by biopanning technique and then genetically fused the peptide to the major coat protein (pVIII) of filamentous M13 phages to form the pVIII-RS phages. We found that the resultant phages could not only bind with the presynthesized BaTiO3 crystals but also induce the nucleation of uniform tetragonal BaTiO3 nanocrystals at room temperature and without the use of toxic reagents to form one-dimensional polycrystalline BaTiO3 nanowires. This approach enables the green synthesis of BaTiO3 polycrystalline nanowires with potential applications in bioimaging and biosensing fields.

Phage-Based Applications in Synthetic Biology

“…Filamentous phages are of great interest to materials scientists because of the ease of displaying peptides with specific functions on the phage surface. For example, screening of phage display libraries identified peptides capable of crystallizing metals onto filamentous phages to produce nanowires for bioelectronics (116)(117)(118). M13 can also be transformed to bind to carbon nanotubes through engineering of its coat protein (119).…”

Sequence-specific control of inorganic nanomaterials morphologies by biomolecules

“…The experimental results demonstrated that only intermediate concentration of T7 can lead to high yields of Pt nanocubes, which agreed with the simulated results. In a special case, as an extension of phage display method, Mao and coworkers [42] selected a peptide sequence that specifically binds to tetragonal barium titanate (BaTiO 3 ) using phage display and then expressed the peptide sequence on the phage. The peptide was then used as the direct template for in situ synthesis of BaTiO 3 polycrystalline nanowires.…”

Virus-Incorporated Biomimetic Nanocomposites for Tissue Regeneration

“…The phage-display library, with a heterogeneous mixture of phages carrying different foreign DNA insert, was created for selective binding of phage proteins with the target ligands, such as polymers, proteins, organic and inorganic crystals, small molecules, such as trinitrotoluene, and cells [48,49,50,51]. Among the phage-display libraries, the reports of p3 and p6 libraries have been well documented in research publications.…”