(Correspondent: Hui Yuan) Recently, Professor Yang Rusen’s team of School of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, Xidian University madea comprehensive and systematic summary of latest research on piezoelectric peptide materials andmetabolite materials in collaboration with ProfessorEhud Gazit’s team ofTel Aviv University. The related article,Piezoelectric Peptide and Metabolite Materials,was published onResearch,and then was reported by WeChat Official Account ofScience.Doctoral student Yuan Hui, supervised by Professor Yang Rusen, the lead author, and Xidian University is the lead unit.

In recent years, more and more synthetic biomaterials including peptide andmetabolite materials exhibited good piezoelectricity. Piezoelectric peptide and metabolite materials demonstrate not only outstanding, optical, and physical properties, but alsointrinsic biocompatibility, degradability, and convenient bio-functionalization, and are promising candidates for muti-functional and implantable devices. Those properties are highly dependent on their self-assembly processes andcrystal structures.Therefore, to understand the self-assembly process and their properties is important for the fundamental study and practical applications.

The article mainly analyzed and made comparison between different structures and piezoelectric properties, further summarized the approaches to improve piezoelectric properties, and described its application in nanogenerators. According to density functional theory (DFT) computation, bandgap of different peptides and metabolite materials were compared, and the conductivity of different materials weresummarized, through analyzingphotoluminescent and optical waveguiding properties, the article put forward its practical application in cancer cell sensing and detection. By comparing thermostability and mechanical stability of different materials, the article proposed practical applications of materials in the fields of nanogenerators and strain sensors. Finally, the article discussed challenges of the application of peptide and metabolite materials, and put forward solutions and the development trend.

It is reported that as the firstcooperative journal ofSciencesince its founding in 1880,Researchis rapidly increasing its international popularity and influence by taking advantages of international platform with high influence and rich top international academic resources ofScience.

Link to relative report:

http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/3ovLq48wS1LBQTmMPM9Yyg

Link to the paper:

http://spj.sciencemag.org/research/2019/9025939/