charge transport phenomena in peptide molecular junctions电荷传输现象在肽分子连接.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Research Letters in Nanotechnology Volume 2008, Article ID 853253, 5 pages doi:10.1155/2008/853253 Research Letter Charge Transport Phenomena in Peptide Molecular Junctions Alessandra Luchini,1, 2 David P. Long,3 Iosif I. Vaisman,4 Emanuel F. Petricoin,2 David H. Geho,2 and Lance A. Liotta2 1 CRO-IRCCS National Cancer Institute, 33081 Aviano, Italy 2 Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine, College of Arts and Sciences, George Mason University, Manassas, VA 20110, USA 3 Research and Development Center, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), 9460 Innovation Drive, Manassas, VA 20110, USA 4 Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, School of Computational Sciences, George Mason University, Manassas, VA 20110, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Alessandra Luchini, aluchini@ Received 23 December 2007; Accepted 10 February 2008 Recommended by Federico Rosei Inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (IETS) is a valuable in situ spectroscopic analysis technique that provides a direct por- trait of the electron transport properties of a molecular species. In the past, IETS has been applied to small molecules. Using self-assembled nanoelectronic junctions, IETS was performed for the first time on a large polypeptide protein peptide in the phos- phorylated and native form, yielding interpretable spectra. A reproducible 10-fold shift of the I/V characteristics of the peptide was observed upon phosphorylation. Phosphorylation can be utilized as a site-specific modification to alter peptide structure and thereby influence electron transport in peptide molecular junctions. It is envisioned that kinases and phosphatases may be used to create tunable systems for molecular