Colloquium 02/02/2012

Mehmet Sayar
College of Engineering
Koc University
Istanbul, Turkey

Peptide Based Materials: Assembly, Structure and Thermodynamic Properties

Peptides are promising building blocks for design and development of novel materials with potential application areas ranging from drug design to biotechnology. The precise control of the molecular structure and the specific nature of the nonbonded interactions among these precise molecules opens up the possibility to obtain aggregates with extremely well defined structural and functional properties. In this talk I will discuss our research on computational modeling of peptide based materials. I will talk about three main topics. In the first part the amphiphilic nature of short peptide oligomers will be investigated. The surface driving force and its decomposition will be analyzed. In the second part aggregation of peptides into fibers will be discussed. Different design features which can be tuned to control aggregation behavior will be analyzed. Finally, I will talk about the coarse-grain modeling of peptide-based materials.