Modeling Protein-Surface Interactions for Biohybrid Solar Energy Utilization

Photosynthesis is a robust and effective mechanism for harnessing solar energy in natural organisms.  However, a closer look reveals photosynthetic systems possess inherently efficient energy capture and energy transfer mechanisms, which when coupled with engineered materials may provide mankind with a low-cost source of clean and renewable power.  In this work, steered molecular dynamics (SMD) simulations are used to probe the structure and properties of the bionano interface in such a device.  We compare the free energies of binding of native photosynthetic and engineered peptide sequences to silica and gold surfaces.  These results can be extrapolated to predict how entire photosynthetic pigment protein complexes may be assembled and patterned in nanostructured biohybrid devices for solar energy utilization.