Tag Archives: Hiroki Sakai

Proteins which cause Alzheimer’s disease can be used to grow functionalized nanowires

This is the first time I’ve ever heard of anything good resulting from Alzheimer’s Disease (even if it’s tangential). From the May 24, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

Prof. Sakaguchi and his team in Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University,jointly with MANA PI Prof. Kohei Uosaki and a research group from the University of California, Santa Barbara, have successfully developed a new technique for efficiently creating functionalized nanowires for the first time ever.

The group focused on the natural propensity of amyloid peptides, molecules which are thought to cause Alzheimer’s disease, to self-assemble into nanowires in an aqueous solution and controlled this molecular property to achieve their feat.

The May 23, 2013 National Institute for Materials press release, which originated the news item, offers insight into why functionalized nanowires are devoutly desired,

Functionalized nanowires are extremely important in the construction of nanodevices because they hold promise for use as integrated circuits and for the generation of novel properties, such as conductivity, catalysts and optical properties which are derived from their fine structure. However, some have remarked on the technical and financial limitations of the microfabrication technology required to create these structures. Meanwhile, molecular self-organization and functionalization have attracted attention in the field of next-generation nanotechnology development. Amyloid peptides, which are thought to cause Alzheimer’s disease, possess the ability to self-assemble into highly stable nanowires in an aqueous solution. Focusing on this, the research team became the first to successfully develop a new method for efficiently creating a multifunctional nanowire by controlling this molecular property.

The team designed a new peptide called SCAP, or structure-controllable amyloid peptide, terminated with a three-amino-acid-residue cap. By combining multiple SCAPs with different caps, the team found that self-organization is highly controlled at the molecular level. Using this new control method, the team formed a molecular nanowire with the largest aspect ratio ever achieved. In addition, they made modifications using various functional molecules including metals, semiconductors and biomolecules that successfully produced an extremely high quality functionalized nanowire. Going forward, this method is expected to contribute significantly to the development of new nanodevices through its application to a wide range of functional nanomaterials with self-organizing properties.

You can find the published paper here,

Formation of Functionalized Nanowires by Control of Self-Assembly Using Multiple Modified Amyloid Peptides by Hiroki Sakai, Ken Watanabe, Yuya Asanomi, Yumiko Kobayashi, Yoshiro Chuman, Lihong Shi, Takuya Masuda, Thomas Wyttenbach, Michael T. Bowers, Kohei Uosaki, & Kazuyasu Sakaguchi1. Advanced Functional Materials. doi: 10.1002/adfm.201300577 Article first published online: 23 APR 2013

The study is behind a paywall.

I have written about nanowires before and, in keeping with today’s theme of peculiar relationships  (Alzheimer’s disease), prior to this, the most unusual nanowire item I’ve come across had to do with growing them to the sounds  of music. From the Nanotech Mysteries (wiki), Scientists get musical page (Note: Footnotes have been removed),

After testing Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water‘, Chopin’s ‘Nocturne Opus 9 no. 1‘, Josh Abraham’s ‘Addicted to Bass‘, Rammstein’s ‘Das Model‘, and Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen‘, David Parlevliet found that music can be used to grow nanowires but they will be kinky.

Scientists want to grow straight nanowires and one of the popular methods is to “[blast] a voltage through silane gas to produce a plasma that pulses on and off at 1000 times a second. Over time the process enables molecules from the gas to deposit on a glass slide in the form of a mesh of crystalline silicon nanowires.”

Parlevliet, a PhD student at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, plugged in a music player instead of a pulse generator usually used for this purpose and observed the results. While there are no current applications for kinky nanowires, the Deep Purple music created the densest mesh. Rammstein’s music grew nanowires the least successfully. In his presentation to the Australian Research Council Nanotechnology Network Symposium in March 2008, Parlevliet concluded that music could become more important for growing nanowires if applications can be found for the kinky ones.