Prathyushakrishna Macha
University of Massachusetts, USA
Title: Self-assembled aromatic peptide nanotubes: biocompatible scaffolds for neural cell proliferation
Biography
Biography: Prathyushakrishna Macha
Abstract
Self-assembly of molecules into ordered structures has been widely studied and is a basis of formation of numerous nanostructures. In our project, we have synthesized aromatic peptide-based nanotubes via solution-phase self-assembly using dityrosine and tryptophan-tyrosine monomers. The morphological features were studied using confocal, scanning electron microscopy, for the thermal behavior we used differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA), whereas for the chemical composition FTIR, RAMAN, CD spectroscopy, and powder x-ray diffraction. Later, plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (an eco-friendly and solvent-free method) was used to synthesize the nanotubes and comparisons were made between former and later methods.
Insights into the biological interactions were obtained using the rat adrenal pheochromocytoma cells (PC-12) and human cells. We used MTT (3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide) assay for cytotoxicity, dopamine-enzyme linked immunesorbent assay and RT-PCR for gene studies. Finally, Quantum chemical computational methods were used to study the molecular interactions in self-assembly