Undercover tactics

Ever since the discovery of carbon nanotubes in the early 1990s, scientists and engineers have been fascinated by the possibilities for these little tubes made of organic materials in the fields of microelectronics, substance separation, and biomedicine. Freiburg researchers have now produced novel nanotube hybrids from peptides and polymers: nanotubes made of cyclic peptides are coated with a soft polymeric plastic shell.

Cyclic peptides are small molecules whose amino acid chains form a ring. The amino and acid groups, as well as the hydrogen atom can be arranged in two ways around the first carbon atom (known as the "alpha C-atom") of an amino acid.

This allows the molecule to have either a "left" or a "right" configuration. While nature uses almost exclusively "left" amino acids in proteins, the team headed by Markus Bieslaski at Germany’s IMTEK (Institute of Microsystem Technology) are building up cyclic peptides according to the "one right, one left" scheme, a technique that has been pioneered by Reza Ghadiri of Scripps Institute, San Diego.