Assembly artificial proteins and conjugated porphyrins for biomolecular materials

It is non-trivia to incorporate both the electron donor and acceptor in a controlled manner into amphiphilic 4-helix bundle peptides. Extended pi-electronÊsystems have been designed and tailored, with appropriate donors, acceptors and constituents, exhibit selected light-induced electron transport and/or proton translocation over large distances. We studied the binding between a series of conjugated porphyrins and the designed amphiphilic 4-helix bundles peptides at selected locations. Incorporation of the conjugated porphyrins into the 4-helix bundle did not interfere the protein secondary structure or the 4-helix bundle formation. The amphiphilic protein/cofactor complexes have good thermal stability.The artificial protein Langmuir monolayers, both the apo- and holo-form, can be oriented vectorially at the air/water interface upon compression. GID show a glass-like inter-bundle positional ordering in the monolayer plane. We will discuss the efforts on re-designing the artificial proteins to incorporate them into these nanoporous templates made from diblock copolymers .