(295a) Biotemplating of Barley Stripe Mosaic Virus Virus-like Particles for Directed Synthesis of Metal Nanomaterials

The synthesis of nanoscale materials of uniform morphology and well-defined architecture is of a substantial interest recently. Biotemplating has become an emerging field in which natural biomolecular objects are utilized for creating functional, hierarchical, controlled patterned structures with nanometric precision. Especially, viral biotemplating has shown great potential in applications because of the features of precise dimension, diversity of architecture and the amenability to genetic/chemical engineering. Recently, in order to overcome the restrictions associated with viral genome and plant-based production, a novel virus biotemplate, Barley stripe mosaic virus virus-like particle (BSMV-VLP) is designed and engineered from an alternative genetically tractable bacterial-based expression platform to produce BSMV capsid proteins which expedites the processing duration for large-scale mass production.

Our most recent focus is on the directed synthesis of metal nanomaterials with the developed BSMV-VLP biotemplates. The hydrothermal synthesis yielded continuous and uniform palladium coatings on the BSMV-VLPs without an exogenous reducing agent. The VLP-mediated nanorods are with a wide range of length scales, of greater uniformity and higher coverage than the ones synthesized with in planta-produced BSMV virion. In addition, it further expands the biotemplating capability of BSMV-VLP to create bimetallic complex nanomaterials. In the absence of an external agent, the synthesis presented the exceptional capability to mineralize different metal nanoparticles onto the virion and form binary metallic mixtures of palladium-platinum, palladium-gold and palladium-copper. The synthesized nanorods of uniform and dense coatings were imaged with transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) were used for elemental composition characterization. We’ve demonstrated a controllable and effective approach for metallic nanorod synthesis on the engineered BSMV-VLP biotemplate using the hydrothermal solution processing. Taken together, this synthetic approach has explored the synthetic palette and opened up enormous possibilities in the bottom-up nanofabrication of versatile and tunable organic-inorganic nanoscaled complex and would facilitate future engineering industrial applications.