Taking inspiration from the human immune system, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have created a new material that can be programmed to identify an endless variety of molecules. The new material resembles tiny sheets of Velcro, each just one-hundred nanometers across. But instead of securing your sneakers, this molecular Velcro mimics the way natural antibodies recognize viruses and toxins, and could lead to a new class of biosensors. “Antibodies have a really effective architectural design: a structural scaffold that pretty much stays the same, whether it’s for snake venom or the common cold, and endlessly variable functional loops that bind foreign invaders,” says Ron Zuckermann, a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry.  “We’ve mimicked that here, with a two-dimensional nanosheet scaffold covered with little functional loops like Velcro.” The research team, from left: Ron Zuckermann, Michael Connolly, and Gloria Olivier, standing next to their custom peptoid-making robot, RONDA. Zuckermann, Director of the Molecular Foundry’s Biological Nanostructures Facility, is corresponding author on a paper reporting these results in ACS Nano, titled “Antibody-Mimetic Peptoid Nanosheets for Molecular Recognition.” Coauthoring the paper are Gloria K. Olivier, Andrew Cho, Babak Sanii, Michael D. Connolly, and Helen

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