Bio-nanomaterial formation via epitaxially guided assembly and its controlling factors

Macromolecular self-assembly is a promising way of fabricating ordered structures with interesting mechanical and optical properties. Learning how to produce highly organized structures and how to mediate the organization provide technological and application wise opportunities at both macroscale and nanoscale. In this study, we worked with an extracellular matrix protein collagen onto different substrates and try to control and to manipulate the assembly process externally. The most attractive benefit of producing biomaterial via self-assembly is the ability of controlling the mechanism by external parameters from nanometer scale to millimeter. Due to the prevalence of collagen fibril in human tissue and its self-assembly ability in vitro, Collagen becomes an important bio-macro molecule frequently used in biomedical materials and tissue engineering applications in recent decades. In this work, by using two different substrates, we observed a direct influence of the surface symmetry on the resulting fibrillar network. The unidirectional and the triangular orientation of collagen molecules at nanoscale in an organized manner give insights for using the network for different purposes of biomedical and biotechnological applications.