Nanoparticle-based biomimetic functional materials (Presentation Recording)

Self-assembly originated from molecules, is ubiquitous from nature to unnature systems. The formation of double-stranded structure of DNA, virus, molecular crystals, liposomes etc. are all instances of molecular self-assembly. In the biological system, for example, virus is an impressive feat of molecular engineering by assembly of hundreds of proteins through the weak hydrophobic effect. We propose a robust strategy for the size-controllable fabrication of gold nanoparticle vesicles(AuNVs) which are biomimetic nanostructures of virus consisted of gold nanoparticles instead of proteins by using carbohydrate terminated fluorinated surface ligand self-assembly with 5~40nm AuNPs, indicating that carbohydrate can act as stronger molecular glue than oligo(ethylene glycol). Carbohydrate was introduced to tune the hydrophilic effect of the ligand by varying the number of glucose (namely, glucose, maltose, and maltotriose). AuNVs size could be efficiently controlled by varying surface ligands, water content in dioxane, and AuNPs size. We find some similarities between VLPs and AuNVs composed of 30nm gold nanoparticles. Photonic properties of not only AuNVs but also other self-assemblies of nanoparticles were measured. Strong surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) of molecules were detected from the AuNVs and self-assembled gold nanoparticles.