Screening of Combinatorial Peptide Libraries for Nanocluster Synthesis

A significant challenge in bionanotechnology is the discovery of effective biological interfaces that allow inorganic nanoscale materials to mimic effectively their biological counterparts. Much like de novo design of proteins, the rational design of such interfaces is a daunting task. An alternative approach is to screen libraries of peptides, inspired by known biological examples of such hybrid protein-material interfaces, for peptide ligands capable of not only stabilizing a size-discrete population of nanoclusters, but providing the requisite biological compatibility. The protocol described in this chapter is an approach for the simultaneous screening of spatially addressable combinatorial libraries for the stabilization of a variety of metal sulfide, metal oxide, and zero-valent nanoclusters. Additionally, the screening process allows the researcher to characterize the resulting nanoclusters in terms of a variety of physical properties. Ultimately, an informatics structure-function analysis may be performed in order to elucidate specific properties of the ligand sets, which provides access to certain desired material characteristics.