Abstract
We report on charge transport across single short peptides using the Mechanically Controlled Break Junction (MCBJ) method. We record thousands of electron transport events across single-molecule junctions and with an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, we identify several classes of traces with multifarious conductance values that may correspond to different peptide conformations. Data analysis shows that very short peptides, which are more rigid, show conductance plateaus at low conductance values of about 10-3G0 and below, with G0 being the conductance quantum, whereas slightly longer, more flexible peptides also show plateaus at higher values. Fully stretched peptide chains exhibit conductance values that are of the same order as that of alkane chains of similar length. The measurements show that in the case of short peptides, different compositions and molecular lengths offer a wide range of junction conformations. Such information is crucial to understand mechanism(s) of charge transport in and across peptide-based biomolecules.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3002-3009 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Nanoscale |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 7 Feb 2021 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Royal Society of Chemistry.
Funding
DS, M. El Abbassi and HSJZ acknowledge financial support by the EU through the H2020 FET QuIET project (no. 767187). Device fabrication was done at the Kavli Nanolab at Delft. CG thanks the Weizmann Inst. for partial support as a sr. PD fellow and the NSFC (21974102) for financial support. DC, MS and CG thank the Israel Science Foundation for partial support.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Horizon 2020 Framework Programme | 767187 |
| European Commission | |
| National Natural Science Foundation of China | 21974102 |
| Israel Science Foundation |