Stir this clear liquid in a glass vial and nothing happens. Shake this liquid, and free-floating sheets of protein-like structures emerge, ready to detect molecules or catalyze a reaction.
This isn't the latest gadget from James Bond's arsenal-rather, the latest research from the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists unveiling how slim sheets of protein-like structures self-assemble.
This "shaken, not stirred" mechanism provides a way to scale up production of these two-dimensional nanosheets for a wide range of applications, such as platforms for sensing, filtration and templating growth of other nanostructures.
Read more in the original publication:
Babak Sanii, Romas Kudirka, Andrew Cho, Neeraja Venkateswaran, Gloria K. Olivier, Alexander M. Olson, Helen Tran, R. Marika Harada, Li Tan, and Ronald N. Zuckermann: Shaken, Not Stirred: Collapsing a Peptoid Monolayer To Produce Free-Floating, Stable Nanosheets. J Am Chem Soc. 2011 Oct 12. [Epub ahead of print]
or at
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/
Keywords : Alexander M. Olson Andrew Cho Babak Sanii Berkley Gloria K. Olivier Helen Tran Li Tan Nano Neeraja Venkateswaran R. Marika Harada Romas Kudirka Ronald N. Zuckermann U.S. Department of Energy
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