期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2009
卷号：106
期号：13
页码：5105-5110
DOI：10.1073/pnas.0900026106
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：How do you design a peptide building block to make 2-dimentional nanowebs and 3-dimensional fibrous mats? This question has not been addressed with peptide self-assembling nanomaterials. This article describes a designed 9-residue peptide, N-Pro-Ser-Phe-Cys-Phe-Lys-Phe-Glu-Pro-C, which creates a strong fishnet-like nanostructure depending on the peptide concentrations and mechanical disruptions. This peptide is intramolecularly amphiphilic because of a single pair of ionic residues, Lys and Glu, at one end and nonionic residues, Phe, Cys, and Phe, at the other end. Circular dichroism and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy analysis demonstrated that this peptide adopts stable {beta}-turn and {beta}-sheet structures and self-assembles into hierarchically arranged supramolecular aggregates in a concentration-dependent fashion, demonstrated by atomic force microscopy and electron microscopy. At high concentrations, the peptide dominantly self-assembled into globular aggregates that were extensively connected with each other to form "beads-on-a-thread" type nanofibers. These long nanofibers were extensively branched and overlapped to form a self-healing peptide hydrogel consisting of >99% water. This peptide can encapsulate the hydrophobic model drug pyrene and slowly release pyrene from coated microcrystals to liposomes. It can effectively stop animal bleeding within 30 s. We proposed a plausible model to interpret the intramolecular amphiphilic self-assembly process and suggest its importance for the future development of new biomaterials for drug delivery and regenerative medicine.
