Fabricating nanowires using bioscaffolds
In the computing industry, the fabrication of nanowires and nanofea-
tures using the ‘top-down’ approach faces tremendous challenges.
Thus, the possibility of fabricating conducting nanowires by molecu-
lar means using peptide scaffolds is of particular interest to the elec-
tronics industry. One can readily envision that nanotubes made from
self-assembling peptides might serve as templates for metallization.
Once the organic scaffold has been removed, a pure conducting wire is
left behind and immobilized on a surface. There is great interest in
developing various methods for attaching conducting metal nanocrys-
tals to a peptide for such a purpose.
Matsui and colleagues63,64 have reported success in functionalizing
peptide nanotubes into nanowires. They not only coated the peptide
nanotube with copper and nickel but also showed that their nanotubes
can be coated with avidin, making them able to bind specifically to
gold surfaces that have previously been treated with biotinylated self-
assembled monolayers63,64.
Lvov et al.65 have fabricated nano- and microwires by coating the
lipid tubules with silica and gold nanocrystals. They found that these
nanocrystals linked to the tubules according to the tubules’ helical