Recently, Dr. Chunhua Cai, a young teacher in college of Materials Science and Engineering, published the latest research results of constructing virus-like hierarchically ordered structure by polypeptide solution self-assembly on the academic authoritative journal Angew. Chem. Int. Ed as the first author. (DOI: 10.1002/anie.201210024)
In this work, they found that the block copolymer and homopolymer of polypeptide were able to co-assemble into virus-like hierarchical structures of rods and spheres, including smooth fibers, superhelices, beads and wool balls by controlling the temperature and the rigidity of the chain segment. These hierarchical structures have homopolymer as the core, and polypeptide copolymers are arranged ordered on the surface of homopolymer’s core to form corona. This structure well mimics the structure of viruses (viruses take DNA or RNA as the core and protein subunit as the shell), which can be used as viruses’ model for relevant research.
Image description :(a) polypeptide block copolymer blends with (b) rigid or (c) flexible homopolymer to form virus-like structure; (d) rod-like; (e) spherical structure
Description: (a) polypeptide block copolymer and polypeptide homopolymer blend system self-assemble to form different fiber structure at different temperature; (b) smooth fiber; (c) Supramolecular helices; (d) Beaded structure of the abacus
Chunhua Cai was admitted to the undergraduate major of Polymer Materials and Engineering in 2000 and received his PhD degree in materials science in 2010. His tutor was Professor Jiaping Lin. He had been working in the research group since then. Since his doctoral studies, he had published 21 papers in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., Chem. Commun., Biomaterials and other important academic journals, and written 2 chapters in English monographs. In 2012, his dissertation was rated as national Excellent Doctoral Dissertation (nominated), which made a breakthrough in this important award for materials discipline of our university.
With the support of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and several research funds and talents projects in Shanghai and Ministry of Education, Professor Jiaping Lin's research group systematically studied the synthesis, self-assembly and biological application of polypeptides, and carried out computer simulation of related work. The combination of experiments and computer simulation to study the self-assembly behavior of polymers has become a major feature of his research group. In recent years, his group published more than 50 papers on Macromolecules, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., ACS Nano, Biomaterials, Chem. Commun., Soft Matter and Langmuir whose IF>3.0. Professor Jiaping Lin was invited to write Review and Feature articles in Adv. Polym. Sci., Chem. Commun., Polymer, etc. Among the doctoral graduates trained by the research group, two were awarded excellent doctoral dissertation in Shanghai and one was awarded national Excellent Doctoral Dissertation (nomination).
At present, hierarchical self-assembly of polypeptide copolymers has become a major research direction of our research group, which has been supported by the key projects of National Natural Science Foundation of China. On the basis of successful preparation of virus-like hierarchical structures, our team’s work expanded to the drug carrier of virus-like structure,the actual virus biology research with virus-like structure (e.g., the virus through the cell membrane process), and using virus-like structures as templates for biomineralization to synthesize hierarchical mineral materials and so on. And we have achieved initial results very well.
