University of Illinois researchers have developed a new approach with applications in materials development for energy capture and storage and for optoelectronic materials. According to Charles Schroeder, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, the results show that peptide precursor materials can be aligned and oriented during their assembly into polypeptides using tailored flows in microfluidic devices.   An optical micrograph of the microchannel junction with red dye flow-focused in water shows experimental conditions used for nanostructure assembly. The research was a collaboration between the labs of Schroeder and William Wilson, a research professor in materials science and engineering and the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at Illinois. Their findings were recently published in a paper entitled, “Fluidic-directed assembly of aligned oligopeptides with pi-conjugated cores” inAdvanced Materials. “A grand challenge in the field of materials science is the ability to direct the assembly of advanced materials for desired functionality,” says Amanda Marciel, a graduate student in Schroeder’s research group. “However, design of new materials is often hindered by our inability to control the structural complexity of synthetic polymers.” “To address the need for controlled processing of functional materials, we developed a microfluidic-based platform to drive the assembly of synthetic oligopeptides,” Marciel explained. “Using

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