Structural and Functional Studies of De Novo Designed Peptides at Surfaces

Sammanfattning: The work presented in this thesis deals with the structural and functional properties of peptides at surfaces. The interaction of peptides with surfaces is an ever so common occurrence in our every day life, from the bug squashed on the windshield of our car to the barnacle on our boat, and from the blood plasma used in the hospital to the proteins in our cells. The effect these occurrences has on our lives is diverse, the bug is annoying whereas the barnacle settlement of ship hull is costly for marine transportation, the blood plasma contains components of vital importance for our immunological defense system and the proteins in our cells are crucial for regulatory processes and life.One part of this thesis, performed as a part of the EU-founded project AMBIO, deals with the concept of marine biofouling. A number of short peptides have been designed, synthesized, and used to investigate their effect on the settlement on marine biofoulers, such as the Ulva linza algae and the Navicula diatom, on template surfaces coated with thin layers of these molecules. The surfaces have been thoroughly investigated with respect of their physio-chemical properties before and after submersion in artificial seawater and ultimately in suspensions containing the organisms. The most interesting results were obtained with an arginine-rich peptide coating that when introduced to Ulva linza zoospores, displayed extensive settlement, compared to reference surfaces. In addition, a large fraction of the settled spores had an abnormal morphology.The other part of this thesis is focused on designed peptides that when adsorbed on a negatively charged surface adopts a well-defined secondary structure, either ?-helical or ?-sheet. Precisely placed amino acids in the peptides will strongly disfavor structure in solution, primarily due to electrostatic repulsion, but when the peptides are adsorbed on the negatively charged surfaces, they adopt a well-defined secondary structure due to ion pair bonding. These interactions have been thoroughly investigated by systematic variations of the side-chains. In order to determine the factors contributing to the induced structure, several peptides with different amino acid sequences have been synthesized. Factors that have been investigated include 1) the positive charge density, 2) distribution of positive charges, 3) negative charge density, 4) increasing hydrophobicity, and 5) incorporating amino acids with different helix propensities. Moreover, pH dependence and the effect of different interaction partners have also been investigated. It has also been shown that the system can be modified to incorporate a catalytic site that is only active when the helix is formed. This research will increase our understanding of peptide-surface interactions and might be of importance for both bionanotechnology and medicine.