Crystal structure of an amphiphilic foldamer reveals a 48-mer assembly comprising a hollow truncated octahedron

Vincenzo Pavone (), Shao-Qing Zhang, Antonello Merlino, Angela Lombardi, Yibing Wu () and William F. DeGrado ()
Additional contact information
Vincenzo Pavone: 46
Shao-Qing Zhang: University of Pennsylvania
Antonello Merlino: 46
Angela Lombardi: 46
Yibing Wu: University of California
William F. DeGrado: University of California

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Foldamers provide an attractive medium to test the mechanisms by which biological macromolecules fold into complex three-dimensional structures, and ultimately to design novel protein-like architectures with properties unprecedented in nature. Here, we describe a large cage-like structure formed from an amphiphilic arylamide foldamer crystallized from aqueous solution. Forty-eight copies of the foldamer assemble into a 5-nm cage-like structure, an omnitruncated octahedron filled with well-ordered ice-like water molecules. The assembly is stabilized by a mix of arylamide stacking interaction, hydrogen bonding and hydrophobic forces. The omnitruncated octahedra tessellate to form a cubic crystal. These findings may provide an important step towards the design of nanostructured particles resembling spherical viruses.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4581 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms4581

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4581

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().