Amino Acid And Peptide Based Gels

2021-2-12
Aykent, Güzide
Self-assembling peptides and amino acid derivatives are becoming an emerging field especially in last decades. Especially for their usage in biomedical applications, tissue engineering and drug delivery, extensive research are being done. Large variety of peptides with different physical and chemical properties were acquired by using different amino acids and their sequences. As a more easily synthesized and bio-inspired alternative materials to the compounds used nowadays for organic electronic devices, gel forming peptides are getting more attention. Design, synthesis and applications of these peptides in biomedical materials and organic electronic devices is a challenging topic that requires alternative structures to get better and easily applied systems. Not only self-assembling peptides, also low molecular weight gelators of amino acid derivatives were developed quite for a wide range of applications. In the first part of this study, conductive peptide-based gels were developed through chemical peptide synthesis, utilizing artificial amino acids. To enhance the conductivity of self-assembling peptides, different artificial amino acids were developed that provide well-ordered structures with enhanced charge mobility through π-π stacking of aromatic units. By using these artificial amino acids different peptide sequences that are able to self-assemble were synthesized and new conductive bio-inspired materials were developed with higher conductivity values than the literature data. In the second part of this study, amino acid based low molecular weight gelators were discovered, even some of them have the lower molecular weight among other amino acid based gelators found in the literature. These newly developed materials are able to form gel in a wide range of solvents and thus, utilized for different applications such as dye removal and drug release studies.

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Citation Formats
G. Aykent, “Amino Acid And Peptide Based Gels,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2021.