Planar Boronic Graphene and Nitrogenized Graphene Heterostructure for Protein Stretch and Confinement

Abstract

Single-molecule techniques such as electron tunneling and atomic force microscopy have attracted growing interests in protein sequencing. For these methods, it is critical to refine and stabilize the protein sample to a “suitable mode” before applying a high-fidelity measurement. Here, we show that a planar heterostructure comprising boronic graphene (BC3) and nitrogenized graphene (C3N) sandwiched stripe (BC3/C3N/BC3) is capable of the effective stretching and confinement of three types of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), including amyloid-β (1–42), polyglutamine (Q42), and α-Synuclein (61–95). Our molecular dynamics simulations demonstrate that the protein molecules interact more strongly with the C3N stripe than the BC3 one, which leads to their capture, elongation, and confinement along the center C3N stripe of the heterostructure. The conformational fluctuations of IDPs are substantially reduced after being stretched. This design may serve as a platform for single-molecule protein analysis with reduced thermal noise.

Two Detection Modes of Nanoslit Sensing Based on Planar Heterostructure of Graphene/Hexagonal Boron Nitride

“…Later, the HBN nanostripes on the heterostructures were designed to sense the DNA chains, , where both the first-principles and MD simulations showed the possibility to identify different bases. Except for the GRA/HBN combinations, other 2D materials were also attempted, and similar results were obtained that DNA molecules showed adsorptive preferences on different 2D materials, including BC3/GRA, GRA/C3N, BC3/C3N, − and SnS 2 /MoS 2 . Although the planar HBN/GRA heterostructures showed feasibility to well control the molecular motion, the ionic currents based on the nanopore of the heterostructures were not reported so far and only the tunneling currents were detected. , …”