SCvF Antibodies as Tools for Assembling Carbon Nanotubes

Erin Oakman
University of Texas, Austin

Carbon nanotubes have received a great deal of attention due to their unique and tunable electronic and materials properties. Despite the interest, many challenges remain in the fields of purification and assembly of nanotubes into functional devices.

With advantage to bottom-up organization, antibodies may be useful tools for advancing this goal since they have remarkably high specificity for targets and can locate and bind their respective antigens in buffered conditions at room temperature. More specifically, SCvF (single-chain variable region fragment) antibodies preserve the binding specificity of complete antibodies, but can be easily modified to make monospecific, bivalent or trivalent conjugates. These proteins were expressed and purified from E. coli and were shown to assemble nanotubes into interesting and functional geometries. Additionally, we performed single-molecule conductivity measurements on single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) before and after antibody binding.