Objective
The aim of the proposed research is to construct and study new amphiphilic architectures built from the ferritin protein cage as a hydrophilic headgroup and a single synthetic polymer as the hydrophobic tail.
These so-called giant amphiphiles have been pre pared before in the host group using single enzymes as the headgroup. However, the use of an intact protein cage is novel and no such structures have been reported in the literature.
The aimed biohybrid polymer/protein architecture is even bigger than the giant amphiphiles studied so far, and the use of the ferritin cavity opens the way to introduce different functionalities (e.g. catalysts).
Ferritin is particularly suited for this purpose as it is monodisperse and robust, and furthermore its demetallated analogue (apo-ferritin) can be used to encase a variety of inorganic potentially catalytic compounds, i.e. forming a self-assembling nanoreactor.
The project consist of three work packages:
- The first one will focus on the modification of the (apo-)ferritin with synthetic polymers. A single attachment point on the protein mantle will be introduced to which a polymer can be coupled or to use it as an initiator to grow a polymer from the nanometre sized bio-particle.
- In work package 2 a detailed study of the self-assembling properties of the novel amphiphilic protein/polymer biohybrids will be carried out. The aggregation process will be studied by a variety of procedures such as spectroscopic studies, calorimetry, microscopy and scattering techniques.
- In the final work package the potential application of the apo-ferritin protein cage as a nanoreactor will be investigated.
Catalytic (inorganic) compounds can be introduced in this cavity, and assembling amphiphiles including different catalysts may eventually lead to a mimic of natural multi-enzyme systems. These complex architectures may be able to carry out a cascade of reactions in which the product of a reaction is the substrate for the next one.
Fields of science
Keywords
Call for proposal
FP6-2005-MOBILITY-5
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
EIF - Marie Curie actions-Intra-European FellowshipsCoordinator
NIJMEGEN
Netherlands