Identification of Toxicity Effects of CuO Materials on as a Function of Environmental Ionic Composition.

Previous work has shown that spherical CuO nanomaterials show negative effects on cell and animal physiology. The biological effects of CuO materials, which posess unique chemical features compared to CuO nanomaterials and can be synthesized in a similarly large variety of shapes and sizes, are comparatively less studied. Here, we synthesized truncated octahedral CuO particles and characterized their structure, stability, and physiological effects in the nematode worm animal model, .

Biomimetic strategies to produce catalytically reactive CuS nanodisks.

Copper sulfide materials have diverse applications from cancer therapy to environmental remediation due to their narrow bandgap and easily tuned plasmon. The synthesis of these materials often involves toxic reagents and harsh conditions where biomimetic methods may provide opportunities to produce these structures under sustainable conditions. To explore this capability, simple amino acids were exploited as biological ligands for the ambient synthesis of CuS materials.

Solution Effects on Peptide-Mediated Reduction and Stabilization of Au Nanoparticles.

Biomimetic methods for the preparation and application of inorganic nanomaterials represent a unique avenue to sustainably generating functional materials with long-term activity. Typically, for the fabrication of these structures, the peptide is mixed with metal ions in solution prior to the addition of an exogenous reductant such as NaBH, leading to nanoparticle nucleation and growth. In biological systems, strong reductants such as NaBH are not available, thus different metal ion reduction methods must be exploited.

Effects of Metal Composition and Ratio on Peptide-Templated Multimetallic PdPt Nanomaterials.

It can be difficult to simultaneously control the size, composition, and morphology of metal nanomaterials under benign aqueous conditions. For this, bioinspired approaches have become increasingly popular due to their ability to stabilize a wide array of metal catalysts under ambient conditions. In this regard, we used the R5 peptide as a three-dimensional template for formation of PdPt bimetallic nanomaterials.

Carbohydrate nanotechnology: hierarchical assembly using nature's other information carrying biopolymers.

Despite their central role in directing some of the most complex biological processes, carbohydrates--nature's other information carrying biopolymer--have been largely ignored as building blocks for synthetic hierarchical assemblies. The non-stoichiometric binding and astronomical diversity characteristic of carbohydrates could lead to tantalizingly complex assembly algorithms, but these attributes simultaneously increase the difficulty of preparing carbohydrate assemblies and anticipating their behavior. Convergences in biotechnology, nanotechnology, polymer chemistry, surface science, and supramolecular chemistry have led to many recent important breakthroughs in glycan microarrays and synthetic carbohydrate receptors, where the idiosyncrasies of carbohydrate structure and binding are increasingly considered.