“Peptides with an affinity for carbon nanotubes with specific chiralities have been selected by phage display for the first time”, claim scientists from Singapore and China. Phage display is a selection technique in which a combinatorial library of polypeptides allows identification of peptides with desired binding specificities to various target molecules.
Separation of single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) with a specific chirality is important in the field of carbon nanotube research and a prerequisite for their applications in nanoelectronics. “The availability of single-chirality SWCNT components is still a formidable challenge, although remarkable progress has been made in obtaining narrow chirality distributions of SWCNTs in the past few years”, explain Liao and co-workers.
The figure on the right shows the “biopanning” procedure designed to retain the desired phage and eliminate the undesired phages in the phage display library. More information about “biopanning” can be obtained by reading the full article online.
Free to access article reference:
Recognition of carbon nanotube chirality by phage display
Ting Yu, Yingxue Gong, Tingting Lu, Li Wei, Yuanqing Li, Yuguang Mu, Yuan Chen and Kin Liao
RSC Adv., 2012, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/C1RA00581B
