Proteins use biomineralization to incorporate metallic elements into tissues, using it to create diverse materials such as seashells, teeth, and bones. However, the way proteins actually do this is not well understood.
Now RIKEN CLST & Yokohama City U scientists have used an artificially designed protein to create a cadmium chloride nanocrystal – the smallest crystal reported so far, made up of just 19 atoms – sandwiched b/n 2 copies of the protein.
In 2014, the groups announced development of an artificial protein, called Pizza6, which looks a lot like a pizza cut into 6 identical slices. The groups’ goal was to design novel proteins—which do not exist in nature—which could be put to a variety of uses eg attractive scaffolds for the creation of new hybrid biomaterials suited to a variety of purposes such as #drug packaging and #delivery to cells, or even bioremediation of hazardous metals in the environment.
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In the current research, Pizza6 was modified by introducing a #metal-binding site. “Our initial impetus was to design metal-binding sites to control the self-assembly of our designed symmetrical proteins. We used computational methods … a new tool for building novel proteins from the ground up by using very cheap metal reagents.”
When the proteins were modified to have a metal-binding site and then placed in a solution of cadmium chloride, they found that trimers of the protein would spontaneously bind together. Using RIKEN’s SPring-8 synchrotron facility in Harima and other facilities, they analyzed the structure at the atomic level and discovered, interestingly, atoms of Cd and Cl had formed a tiny lattice, sandwiched between 2 “pizzas.”
The results indicate feasibility of rationally-designed symmetrical proteins to biomineralize nanocrystals. APPS: nano-devices eg biopharmaceuticals, biosensors, light-driven switches, and synthetic enzymes from the bottom up.” http://www.nanowerk.com/nanotechnology-news/newsid=40660.php
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