Structural Elucidation of a Polypeptoid Chain in a Crystalline Lattice Reveals Key Morphology-Directing Role of the N-Terminus.

Abstract

The ability to engineer synthetic polymers with the same structural precision as biomacromolecules is crucial to enable the <i>de novo</i> design of robust nanomaterials with biomimetic function. Peptoids, poly(<i>N</i>-substituted) glycines, are a highly controllable bio-inspired polymer family that can assemble into a variety of functional, crystalline nanostructures over a wide range of sequences. Extensive investigation on the molecular packing in these lattices has been reported; however, many key atomic-level details of the molecular structure remain underexplored. Here, we use cryo-TEM 3D reconstruction to directly visualize the conformation of an individual polymer chain within a peptoid nanofiber lattice in real space at 3.6 Å resolution. The backbone in the <i>N</i>-decylglycine hydrophobic core is shown to clearly adopt an extended, all-<i>cis</i>-sigma strand conformation, as previously suggested in many peptoid lattice models. We also show that packing interactions (covalent and noncovalent) at the solvent-exposed N-termini have a dominant impact on the local chain ordering and hence the ability of the chains to pack into well-ordered lattices. Peptoids in pure water form fibers with limited growth in the <i>a</i> direction (<14 molecules in width), whereas in the presence of formamide, they grow to over microns in length in the <i>a</i> direction. This dependence points to the significant role of the chain terminus in determining the long-range order in the packing of peptoid lattices and provides an opportunity to modulate lattice stability and nanoscale morphology by the addition of exogenous small molecules. These findings help resolve a major challenge in the <i>de novo</i> structure-based design of sequence-defined biomimetic nanostructures based on crystalline domains and should accelerate the design of functional nanostructures.