Exploiting localized surface binding effects to enhance the catalytic reactivity of peptide-capped nanoparticles.

Peptide-based methods represent new approaches to selectively produce nanostructures with potentially important functionality. Unfortunately, biocombinatorial methods can only select peptides with target affinity and not for the properties of the final material. In this work, we present evidence to demonstrate that materials-directing peptides can be controllably modified to substantially enhance particle functionality without significantly altering nanostructural morphology. To this end, modification of selected residues to vary the site-specific binding strength and biological recognition can be employed to increase the catalytic efficiency of peptide-capped Pd nanoparticles. These results represent a step toward the de novo design of materials-directing peptides that control nanoparticle structure/function relationships.