Abstract

BackgroundIn the past decade spherical and rod-like viruses have been used for the design and synthesis of new kind of nanomaterials with unique chemical positioning, shape, and dimensions in the nanosize regime. Wild type and genetic engineered viruses have served as excellent templates and scaffolds for the synthesis of hybrid materials with unique properties imparted by the incorporation of biological and organic moieties and inorganic nanoparticles. Although great advances have been accomplished, still there is a broad interest in developing reaction conditions suitable for biological templates while not limiting the material property of the product.ResultsWe demonstrate the controlled synthesis of copper nanorods and nanowires by electroless deposition of Cu on three types of Pd-activated rod-like viruses. Our aqueous solution-based method is scalable and versatile for biotemplating, resulting in Cu-nanorods 24–46 nm in diameter as measured by transmission electron microscopy. Cu2+ was chemically reduced onto Pd activated tobacco mosaic virus, fd and M13 bacteriophages to produce a complete and uniform Cu coverage. The Cu coating was a combination of Cu0 and Cu2O as determined by X- ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis. A capping agent, synthesized in house, was used to disperse Cu-nanorods in aqueous and organic solvents. Likewise, reactions were developed to produce Cu-nanowires by metallization of polyaniline-coated tobacco mosaic virus.ConclusionsSynthesis conditions described in the current work are scalable and amenable for biological templates. The synthesized structures preserve the dimensions and shape of the rod-like viruses utilized during the study. The current work opens the possibility of generating a variety of nanorods and nanowires of different lengths ranging from 300 nm to micron sizes. Such biological-based materials may find ample use in nanoelectronics, sensing, and cancer therapy.

Highlights

  • In the past decade spherical and rod-like viruses have been used for the design and synthesis of new kind of nanomaterials with unique chemical positioning, shape, and dimensions in the nanosize regime

  • Electroless deposition of Pd on wild type (WT) tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) The synthesis of TMV-templated Cu-nanorods was achieved by a two-step electroless deposition on wild type (WT) TMV

  • Pd-coated TMV (Pd-TMV) treated with ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) and collected by centrifugation were resuspended in water without visible aggregation (Figure 1d) while Pd-TMV not treated with EDTA resulted in nanorods that did not resuspend in water after centrifugation

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Summary

Introduction

In the past decade spherical and rod-like viruses have been used for the design and synthesis of new kind of nanomaterials with unique chemical positioning, shape, and dimensions in the nanosize regime. A great interest in gold nanorods is being motivated by their potential applications in various technologies including optical filtering, subwavelength imaging, data storage, and sensor devices [1,2]. Biotemplating is an attractive method to synthesize nanosize inorganic materials because it takes advantage of the well-defined size and shape of the biological structures and the surface functional groups that can interact with metal atoms leading to nucleation and growth of nanoparticles. It can potentially produce a wide variety of materials for applications in electronics, sensing, optics, and cancer therapy [8,9,10]

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