Tunable assembly of biomimetic peptoids as templates to control nanostructure catalytic activity

Nanostructured materials present new opportunities to achieve sustainable catalytic reactivity. Fabrication and organization of these catalytic particles for enhanced reactivity remain challenging due to limited synthetic and organization strategies. Biomimetic approaches represent new avenues to address such challenges. Here we report the tunable assembly of sequence-defined peptoids as templates to control the formation of highly reactive Pd nanostructures of different arrangements. In this regard, peptoid 2D membranes and 1D fibers were assembled and used to template Pd nanoparticles in specific orientations. Catalytic analysis of the resulting materials demonstrated enhanced reactivity from the fiber-based system due to changes in inorganic material display. These results suggest that the morphology of peptoid-based templates plays an important role in controlling material properties, which could open a new direction of using peptoid assemblies for applications in optics, plasmonics, sensing, etc.