PNNL

Abstract

Nanostructured materials present new opportunities to achieve sustainable catalytic reactivity. Fabrication and organization of these catalytic particles for enhanced reactivity remain challenging due to limited synthetic and organization strategies. Biomimetic approaches represent new avenues to address such challenges. Here we report the tunable assembly of sequence-defined peptoids as templates to control the formation of highly reactive Pd nanostructures of different arrangements. In this regard, peptoid 2D membranes and 1D fibers were assembled and used to template Pd nanoparticles in specific orientations. Catalytic analysis of the resulting materials demonstrated enhanced reactivity from the fiber-based system due to changes in inorganic material display. These results suggest that the morphology of peptoid-based templates plays an important role in controlling material properties, which could open a new direction of using the peptoid assembly for applications in optics, plasmonics, sensing, etc. MRK and NAM acknowledge financial support from the University of Miami. XRD work was conducted at the Advanced Light Source with support from the Molecular Foundry, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, both of which are supported by the Office of Science, under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Peptoid synthesis and assembly work was supported by the Materials Synthesis and Simulation Across Scales (MS3) Initiative through the LDRD fund at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). PNNL is multi-program national laboratory operated for Department of Energy by Battelle under Contract No. DE-AC05-76RL01830.