A new paper has been published in Advanced Materials (Back Cover)-Peng Yang

Development of new methods to tailor chemical and physical structure on material surface/interface plays central role in material science and engineering. However, one of the biggest challenges in this field is to lack a universal method that is able to rapidly and stably prime virtually arbitrary material surfaces especially those having low surface free energy.

Towards this limitation, under the funding of National Science Foundation of China (Grants 21374057, 51303100), Prof. Peng Yang at Shaanxi Normal University (Xi’an, China) developed natural biopolymer-guided surface functionalization, and the lysozyme-based interfacial material was proposed for the first time to behave as an advanced coating towards virtually arbitrary material surfaces. Yang found that when a mild chemical stimuli was introduced in a lysozyme buffer, lysozymes could quickly assembly into a necklace-like fiber network (Macromol. Biosci. 2012, 12, 1053), which could subsequently attach onto a variety of material surfaces including metal, polymer and inorganic materials. The attachment resulted in a stable coating on material surface, and this coating could be directly used or subjected to further functionalization (Adv. Mater. Interfaces 2015, 2, 1400401, front cover). After that, they found that the coating carried positive charges, which could capture/release the negatively charged giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs), providing a new approach towards the system of the controllable capture/release of cells (Soft Matter, 2015, 11, 3094, back cover).

Based on the above findings, Yang and co-workers reported their most recent work, in newest issue of Advanced Materials, that the lysozyme fiber network was able to afford a superhydrophobic coating and protein crystallization can be largely facilitated on such a platform (Adv. Mater. 2015, DOI: 10.1002/adma.201504769). Due to the unique wettability, superhydrophobic surfaces have demonstrated their great values in modern material science. Nonetheless, the development of such a strategy to fully satisfy the practical demands is still challenging, and new applications driven by superhydrophobic material is increasingly attractive to a wide range of science and engineering realms. Protein crystallization is extremely important in the field of structural biology and biomedicines. However, many proteins are not easy to get their crystals, and producing high-quality crystals with a higher chance of success remains a major bottleneck. Yang and coworkers conceived a strategy to address the above consideration, and a facile production of superhydrophobic material in a green, energy-saving and low-cost process was achieved. They found that various surfaces could be densely covered by a structured lysozyme coating at ambient aqueous condition. The resultant surface structuration was effective enough to offer superhydrophobicity after the coating was further hydrophobized by low surface energy molecules. The superhydrophobic coating possessed a good mechanical stability towards external peeling and thermal resistance in the temperature range of -196-200 ℃. For the first time, it was demonstrated that the protein crystallization could be largely accelerated and facilitated on the protein-based superhydrophobic surface. On such platform, protein crystals could be acquired in large scale, low concentration and without the use of additional precipitation/toxic additives. By combining the protein spotting and crystallization together on the superhydrophobic surface, a protein crystal array in large area was conveniently obtained. Since majority of proteins is difficult to crystallize, the present method to feasibly obtain protein crystals (array) is appealing. This work thus opens new fields in structural biology, high throughput screening of protein crystallization, bio-based medicines, opt-electronics and surface modifications.

For more information, please visit the following website:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/adma.201504769/abstract

This work has been highlighted on MaterialsViews:

http://www.materialsviews.com/like-crystallizes-like-universal-lysozyme-based-coating-facilitates-protein-crystallization/

or Click the following link for the video introduction：

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr1ggmh77Yw

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTM5MjczNDkxNg==.html