Peptide Optoelectronics Appears in Top Journal
The research work on peptide-mediated constructs of quantum dot (QDot) nanocomposites led by EURYI Assoc. Prof. Hilmi Volkan Demir (EEE, PHYS, and UNAM) has been published in Nano Letters 11, 1530 (2011), one of the most prestigious, top-rated journals in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. The team worked together with their lab at NTU, Singapore, with which Bilkent has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding. This is the first experimental work published in Nano Letters by a completely Turkish research team. In this work, a bottom-up approach for constructing QDot nanocomposites that facilitate Förster-type nonradiative energy transfer using polyelectrolyte peptides has been proposed and realized. Here Dr. Urartu Özgür Şafak Şeker, the first author of the work, and the co-author Tuncay Özel successfully cut the QDot nanocomposite with a protease by digesting the biomimetic peptide layer upon which the QDot assembly was erected. This has enabled the control of energy transfer process and photoluminescence decay lifetime of QDots by such a proteolytic enzyme activity. This has thus allowed for modulating these bioenabled layered system for biosensing applications through energy transfer between QDots. This biomimetic system is one of the first demonstrations in the area with a number of potential applications in medicine. Prof. Demir's group has been working on peptide optoelectronics and employing QDot nanocrystals in these peptide-assisted constructions utilized for various photonic functions including LEDs and photovoltaics for over 5 years. As a collaboration with Washington University and Istanbul Technical University, the leading author Dr. Demir and co-workers have also previously demonstrated spatially selective assembly of QDot light emitters in an LED using engineered peptides, which has been published in a top-tier journal of nanoscience and nanotechnology, ACS Nano 5, 2735 (2011).