Speaker : Prof. Hee-Seung Lee

Affiliation : Department of Chemistry, KAIST

Title : Recent Progress in Foldecture Research

Date : December 18, 2015

Location : Science building 604

Time : 5 pm

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Abstract

The design and synthesis of giant, protein-like molecular assemblies from peptidic materials in a flask remains a significant challenge in light of the marvelous topological complexity as well as functional anisotropy realized in biological architectures such as viral capsids and intracellular microcompartments. Attempts to understand the self-assembly process through a “bottom-up” analysis of the interactions between individual constituents have attracted considerable interest as a way to engineer macroscopic morphologies.

​We have demonstrated that it is feasible to synthesize a variety of three dimensional (3D) organic molecular architectures from a set of foldamers (artificial peptides) with an identical secondary structure, such as 12-helix or 11-helix. We coined the new term “foldectures” to describe a new class of crystalline peptidic material with unprecedented topological complexity derived from the rapid and non-equilibrium aqueous phase self-assembly of foldamers. Foldectures, although they are exclusively composed of peptides, exhibit unseen structural properties (for example, discrete and diverse morphogenesis, high crystallinity, and unrivaled uniformity in shape and size) that can meet the requirements for the design of new biocompatible, hierarchical assemblies. Recently we have shown that foldectures are proven to be suitable molecular platforms for amplifying diamagnetic anisotropy at the molecular level and observing their macroscopic motions. In this seminar, recent progress in our foldecture research will be discussed.