Strategies towards controlled surface decoration of Au-NRs

GONZALEZ SOLVEYRA, ESTEFANIA; SZLEIFER, IGAL

Orlando

Congreso; ACS Spring meeting 2019; 2019

American Chemistry Society

Anisotropic functionalized nanorods provide orientation dependent properties interesting in several new applications. In this work we seek to identify thedesign rules for obtaining gold nanorods (Au-NRs) that combine surface-adsorbed polymers of different molecular architecture and chemistry in a spatiallyresolved manner. The questions we want to answer are whether it is possible to spatially control the functionalization of nanosystems combining curvatureand molecular architecture effects, and more specifically, if it is possible to outline rules using molecular modeling to direct and assist the design andexperimental synthesis of functionalized Au-NRs.To that end, we modeled the effect of local curvature on the surface functionalization of Au-NRs with polymer mixtures. The studied functional groupsconsist of linear and branched peptidomimetic polypeptoids, with PEG branches containing biotin groups. We perform systematic analysis on theadsorption processes varying the backbone length, number of branches, monomer type, polymer sequence, solution conditions, and solvent quality. Wefound the surface density of each polymer in the mixture to be position dependent, and it can be tuned by changing the polymer mixture pair, as shown inFig. 1: in all the mixtures shown, the linear peptoid is the same, but its adsorption changes drastically when changing the monomer type of the branchedpolymer.