M13 bacteriophage: A nanotool for the fabrication of novel self-assembled nanostructures

M13 is a filamentous bacteriophage that is constantly attracting the interest of several scientific communities. Since its discovery, it has been crucial in the progress of cloning vectors during the ’70s and later, in 1985, also for the development of ‘phage display’.

The latter introduced the use of genetically engineered bacteriophages for applications in many scientific fields, ranging from biology to chemistry and physical sciences, growing exponentially.

This thesis focuses on the application of M13 for the manufacturing of novel self-assembled nanostructures for the production of functional materials. For this purpose, M13 was also combined with additional building blocks including graphene oxide and proteins, producing novel composite materials.

In particular, the results obtained during this work show how to successfully assemble M13 and graphene oxide in a self-standing ultra-low-density porous material named GraPhage13 and test its properties. Furthermore, other nano-architectures have been devised, for which the self-assembly process is based on non-covalent interactions or covalent bonds such as GRX-N13 and SAS-M13, respectively.

The fabricated structures can be potentially applied in the biomedical, environmental and energy fields, and in particular, used for the manufacture of batteries, supercapacitors, absorbers, biochemical sensors, optical and photonic devices.