Abstract
Single-molecule techniques such as electron tunneling and atomic force microscopy have attracted growing interests in protein sequencing. For these methods, it is critical to refine and stabilize the protein sample to a “suitable mode” before applying a high-fidelity measurement. Here, we show that a planar heterostructure comprising boronic graphene (BC3) and nitrogenized graphene (C3N) sandwiched stripe (BC3/C3N/BC3) is capable of the effective stretching and confinement of three types of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), including amyloid-β (1–42), polyglutamine (Q42), and α-Synuclein (61–95). Our molecular dynamics simulations demonstrate that the protein molecules interact more strongly with the C3N stripe than the BC3 one, which leads to their capture, elongation, and confinement along the center C3N stripe of the heterostructure. The conformational fluctuations of IDPs are substantially reduced after being stretched. This design may serve as a platform for single-molecule protein analysis with reduced thermal noise.
Highlights
Protein sequencing at the single-molecule level is crucial for personalized medicines and the detection of post-translational modifications in proteins [1,2,3,4]
Several single-molecule techniques such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) [5,6], quantum tunneling [7,8,9], and nanopore [3,10,11] have been proposed for protein sequencing, which allow the direct read-out of structural differences of individual amino acids
We have shown that the conformational fluctuations of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) were significantly reduced when IDPs were confined on the C3N stripe
Summary
Protein sequencing at the single-molecule level is crucial for personalized medicines and the detection of post-translational modifications in proteins [1,2,3,4]. The non-specific interaction between the protein and the nanostructure can affect the precision of measurement and induce clogging [4,12] To address these issues, a planar two-dimensional (2D) heterostructure has recently been proposed for biomolecular capture, stretching, and confinement [17,18,19]. Biomolecules 2021, 11, 1756 and induce clogging [4,12] N stripe sandwiched between sandwiched between twotwo dostretched intointo a linear manner along the the This highly regular and confined conformation might be suitable for analysis by mains.
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